Stamp the envelope. Take outside, mail in a corner mailbox.

(Does it signify anything that the mailbox less than fifty yards from my residence has been defaced with graffiti in white spray paint?)

(In conventional fiction, certainly: such graffiti would be “symbolic.” In the less-classifiable prose for which N__ is known, the very point of the observation may be its [ontological] pointlessness.)

Calculating when this envelope will be received by Keisha. Not tomorrow, but surely the following day. When Keisha arrives at the grocery, the manager McGuire will hand the envelope to her with a quizzical smile—Keisha! Here is something for you.

Taken by surprise, embarrassed, suspecting nothing and with nothing to hide, Keisha will (probably) open the envelope as McGuire looks on; she will be stunned to discover the fifty-dollar bill with the scarcely explanatory note for Keisha.

Almost, I can hear the woman’s baffled stammer—Oh. Oh, dear. What on earth is … Almost, I can see the blush rising in her sallow-skinned girl’s face.

Beyond this, what inane remarks McGuire might make, what comments from coworkers expressing surprise, amazement, a twinge (no doubt) of jealousy—I have not the slightest curiosity.

Out of the void, a fifty-dollar bill sent to her—Keisha will be suffused with wonder: Who is her (anonymous) benefactor? And why her? One of the great mysteries of the woman’s life, never to be (fully) explained.

5.

Humdrum, ordinary, predictable, unexceptional—banal, trite, commonplace. The lives of most, possibly all, inhabitants of Herrontown, PA, whose population declined precipitously in the 1950s with the closing of several factories and whose most distinguished architecture is a ruin—the old Erikson mansion atop Wolf Pit Mountain. (Absurd to speak of Wolf Pit Mountain as anything other than a high, steep hill with a scenic view of the Delaware River extending for miles.)

All that is new in Herrontown, or relatively new, is, at the river’s edge, a redbrick factory that was once Pennsylvania’s premier manufacturer of ladies’ hats and gloves, now under reconstruction into what the builder describes as a luxury condominium village.

(Will the condominium village ever be completed? Doubtful.)

(Like repairs to the old, once-elegant brownstone in which I live amid minimal furnishings, curtainless windows emitting a stark, raw light from the river, bare hardwood floors, and boxes of books I haven’t gotten around to unpacking, for there are—literally!—no bookcases in the house to receive them, and I have not gotten around to purchasing bookcases, reasoning that the effort involved might be disproportionate to the actual use I will make of the [several thousand] books that have followed me around for decades like old, lost, reproachful loves, most of whose names I have forgotten.)

Humdrum and ordinary setting, in the most humdrum and ordinary of seasons—late winter, early April.