New York City, December 29, 2014

★★★★ Someone’s track pants billowed like suiting in the moving air. Contrails made plaid of the blue sky. The cold was not deep enough to exact a penalty for walking out with hair still wet from the shower. The daylight seemed already more expansive, just a week past its minimum. A silvery, rimpled sheet of cloud caught the afternoon light in the west. Then the colored sunbeams broke free, tracing each railing post and vent pipe on the top of the new-built tower — and the puff of vapor from one of the pipes, the guts of the building having come alive at last. The sun had recovered its confidence. Pale pinks and purple-grays washed over the clouds, and then. And then: a flamingo-down pillow ripped violently open, exploding over the avenue. People stopped dead to snap pictures. Bits of hot magenta scattered all the way off to the north. After the sun had taken its colors below the horizon, its canvas was revealed to be a cloud formation so thin that the white moon, just fuller than half, shone straight through it.