The angle of the western sun penetrated the formless clouds, smeared wholly in a defiant cold grey across the cathedral sky. The sky hung like a dome, as if its canvas awaited the initiation of a grand commission. The yellow sun hid under the layer of the grey coating, making it colorless, incrementally shifting its illuminance from one degree to another, and because the canvas was so tethered wholly in a smeared stroke, the white-yellow sun could not be revealed.
Like a cathedral, the air was still.
No opportunity presented the canvassed sky to sift away its clouds and shine the pews of the earth.
What often would bring a glare into the eyes of wives’ standing stolidly by the kitchen windows of the white-tiled homes, equidistant and consecutive, within which the faucet ran cold, and the porcelain cream dish scrubbed in quick fingers with back and forth movements, this sunless day the eyes required little squint onto the gradient arc of the sky.
A thousand identical homes puttered curved driveways from their mouths and twisted into long roads, then they flanked beyond their interconnection by sheen fields of grass that stretched for several miles in all direction.
The green sheets, still in the windless air, met the cold whooshing highway that slid and curved like a riverbank, and it slunk low on the ground. The curve was appropriate because it attached to the long mountains with surfaces of black rocks, grey dirt, green trees, and white tipped pinpointed tops; and on the top formed a derivative of the grey smearing of the sky, but in a whiter-than-white white.
Within the walls of a quiet home, under the cold running faucet, Emily looked out the square kitchen window in a purposefully hazy glare to dissolve the wooden beams which formed four quadrants within a single square. The willows on the mountains moved, and the hoods of the speck-like cars silently glided from the left curve into the deeper curve of the mountain, and canvass of the sky shifted with the halo of light beneath its layer. Emily turned off the faucet to pick the buttered crumps off the edge of a bread knife. She looked back out without squinting and held the view for a while. There was movement but she did not discern any, and so it seemed like a frozen painting.
The house was quiet. Nothing stirred but the scrubbing porcelain.
From the living room, Earl coughed and flipped a page. It sounded like smooth sandpaper in the quiet home. Emily wiped the countertops with a cloth, squeezed the water into the sink, looked at the sky again, and walked to the living room.
“More of the same. Drab and grey.”
Earl nodded without looking up. “Mm-hmm.”
She watched him on the couch, composed and serious, circling a raised letter with the edge of his middle finger on the cover of the book he was reading, and she wondered if that sensation was not unlike her taut tit he toyed with the previous evening after he came inside her. Or perhaps it resembled more of whomever he fancied in the novel, someone younger and piquant in humor as opposed to her. She stared too long until he flipped another page and muttered, “Damn commies. Gotta show them…”