Half-life of a Saturday The mug's meniscus still trembles. Something passed through here— not a person, not wind exactly, but the pressure change a body leaves when it steps just out of frame. The book doesn't know it's been abandoned. It lies open at page one-fourteen, holding a sentence about light that light itself is now completing. Dust performs the scene: slowed, gilded, processional. Each mote an understudy for the one who should be sitting in the chair angled toward elsewhere. The harbour out there turns its bedsheets over and over, never getting comfortable. The trees reach and reach and grab only more reaching. This is not emptiness. This is the room still listening for the click of a cup being set down.