Standing in someone’s kitchen, slicing a lemon, she understood that the knife would slip and she would cut herself and she did.
It was one of those microseconds that’s long and slow and nuclear-packed with information and she knew it would happen and kept on slicing and then it happened, she cut her finger and watched the blood edge from the knife line and slide unevenly down her knuckle.
She watched people sunbathing, they did it so completely, dominating the experience, a woman flopped on a ledge with a blanket and a pitcher of iced tea and a child’s drinking glass appliquéd with flowers and a paperback book that Klara tried to spy the title of—they did it without conceding anything to the stone ledges or pitched roofs or breathless tar surfaces, it was the spectacle of here I am, and there’s a window washer’s empty rig scaling the side of a slab tower. She saw a brick facade flushed with coral light, more or less on fire with light, and the brick seemed revealed the way only light reveals a thing—it is baked clay of some intenser beauty than she’d ever thought to notice. And there’s the old lady again sitting in her webbed chair with the reflector under her chin and faces sacrificially into the sun, a plattered head going mummy-brown in the deeps of a summer day.
She watched the blood slide out from the cut and noticed the creases and whorls in her finger and heard the music in the next room, it’s Esther’s husband Jack playing one of his old 45s, the swing-band music that drives his guests out onto the roof.
The garbage was down there, stacked in identical black plastic bags, and she walked home past a broad mound that covered a fire hydrant and part of a bus sign and she saw how everyone agreed together not to notice.
