EXCERPT from In Franklin's House

I replaced the diary to pick up the necklace. The dim closet light bulb tinged the rosebud with an ivory hue. I fingered the fine links and hung it around my neck. The rosebud nestled in the cleft between my breasts.

Outside the closet I switched off the lights and back at the windows observed violence minus a sound track. In this aerie the storm lost malice. Then, as I scanned the night, the remaining downtown lights blinked out. The valley was completely black.

Was this how it had looked at night in 1905-06? Had there been electricity? Had—There came a creak and I stiffened. Every inch of my body was alert. My throat tensed as across my back I felt a breeze and smelled stagnant air. The closet door couldn’t be opening. But like a solid shadow behind me I sensed a something—a someone. Unable to breathe, to swallow, I was paralyzed, pinned by these windows.

A bump as if a door knob collided with a wall. My lungs ached and I gulped. Mustn’t panic. The storm had forced the closet door open. I didn’t close it tightly.

“I’m in my room, my favorite room,” I silently affirmed, while my body told me that I wasn’t alone.

My shallow breathing grated upon the air. It/He/Whatever, must hear my ragged breathing, must realize my terror. I’d read that if a rapist or mugger sensed the victim’s fear, the victim was lost, for it must be a rapist or mugger who stood, simply stood behind me with no hoarse breathing, with no movement signaling his advance. Somehow this afternoon while I was out, he’d broken into the house. “Think, Kate, think. He wasn’t in the closet seconds ago. The stairway door is closed. Think.”

EXCERPT from Notes When Summer Ends—

Friday night—

I’ve always liked the night, especially a night heavy with summer. Right now such richness presses so closely that it holds the eddy of cigarette smoke in this room, Cammy’s room. The smoke curls toward the open window, but unable to escape through the screen, it loops toward me and Cammy’s ladder-backed chair.

I glance around the neat, severe room. Yet, in the careful lines of the tucked white chenille bedspread or in the primrose decorating the back of the hand-mirror lying on the dresser, I detect a hidden passion, a barely-submerged sensuousness that lurks as well within Cammy.

Inhaling, I tap my cigarette against the rim of a teacup commandeered from downstairs for an ash tray. Ann is expected any minute, or I’d smoke on the front porch. As a Californian, she’ll be offended by cigarettes, and on a night when nothing moves, when blackness shapes wind-free pockets around every object, the smoke would hug the porch.

Cammy won’t mind if I light another one after I finish this one. She’ll forgive whatever I do, because from our first meeting we established a link I can’t explain.