I feel heat coming from the fireplace, warming half of me on the chaise, my fingers wrapped around a book. I hear my boyfriend on the phone, echoes of his conversation spilling through the closed office door and down the stairs. He has a radio disc jockey voice, deep with vibrations, which becomes louder as he grows more impatient. The television, muted, shows a simulation of how the solar eclipse, not quite total, will trace a swath across the region. I look out the window and see the white of sky above flat snow, such stillness that one could believe the earth has stopped spinning entirely.
My boyfriend’s steps thud on the stairs. “She’s coming over,” he says. His intensity ruffles me, the way he picks at cuticles and pulls at neck hairs.
I sit up. “Here? Now?” My tender relationship with this house wavers.
