2008-05-08 - 1:01 a.m.

When it's a warm night, like it is now, we open the windows. It's nice. If there's a breeze it'll make all the wind chimes chatter. We hear alley cats doing late-night alley cat things. (There goes one now. She's unhappy, I think.) The trash truck comes twice a week, and late, and it's loud. Sometimes the trash guys shout and when they do sometimes they shout about the Orioles but more often it's a curse, directed at something heavy, or just at the world, maybe. The girl on the first floor, just below, has a loud laugh. She listens to Spoon and the Beatles, sometimes some singalong Elton John. Sirens drift in from blocks away and train cars hitch and squeal.

There are no screens on the windows. It took me a while, but I got over that. Where I grew up, it was unheard of to have an unscreened window open to the world like that. It was because of the bugs. But here, there are very few bugs. We're in the city and all that.

But, just now, I was sitting in the dark, reading the New York Times on my laptop. I was reading about a house in London with a stairway made of glass. And a fly, attracted by the light, landed on the screen. I shooed it away, but ten seconds later, a sentence later, it was back, in the same place. I flicked it. I didn't expect to get it, but maybe it was lulled by the New York Times' white light. Maybe it was just cool enough that it was sleepy, sluggish, ripe for the taking. It fell to my keyboard. It was not a big fly, but a little one, or maybe an adolescent. It nestled between the "p" and the "o" keys. I brushed it aside. Its buzzing, its tap tap tap against the laptop's screen, had stopped altogether.

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