a doctor, notices; notices also the woman’s

black hair, her olive skin, for a moment,

annoyed by her husband’s clumsiness

in flirting with her. She herself can easily picture

the image he’s recounted, coming as it has

from their life together, the dawn they spent

on a birding tour he’d taken her on

for their anniversary. Her husband

had been captivated by the thought

of witnessing a murmuration, and so they’d stood

all dawn in a wet field to watch

swarms of birds stretch

and collapse above them in dark parabolas,

one shape lifting out of the next, blooming

and rising without once

seeming to collide. It must be sex

that drives them to it, she remembers

teasing her husband, though she regrets

having said this, it had diminished

the morning, her husband’s joy, the whirling,

star-shaped arms glittering above them.

Perhaps, she thinks, looking

at the young professor, this woman

would have been more moved.

She imagines the other woman

there now in the field, softening

under her husband’s attention. She imagines her

taking his hand. She imagines her following him

into their host’s marble bathroom,

pressing against him by the onyx sink.

Now the two of them are alone

at her own home while she’s at work:

her husband has just finished an article;

the literature professor, who lives

nearby, has wandered over

with a cup of coffee. It would be easy for her

to do this: to take off her blouse, her shoes,

her skirt, to offer herself to him, so young

he could never refuse her, the doctor

flushing now, thinking of it, bemused

by this jealousy that she alone

has authored. Perhaps this

is the defining feature of humanity,

she thinks: the capacity to imagine

some small cruelty and take pleasure in it,

regardless of the truth, knowing later

she won’t be able to stop herself

from punishing her husband. The young

literature professor, a recent

transplant from Lahore, has been texting

all night beneath the dinner table.

She’s comforting her son, who’s asked to leave

the expensive boarding school

she enrolled him in after the bomb

ripped through the concert hall they’d nearly

visited together. He wants to join her

in America, he says. He’s sick

of the food, the rules, and she is lying to him,

promising he’ll come join her in the US soon

after winter break, though she won’t

ever let him. If it is dangerous at home

it is dangerous here, too: she does not want

him to become like her students, his brash

yet strangely sensitive temperament crystallizing

unchecked in the American classroom,

his haphazard talent for work turned

into a satisfaction with his own ignorance.

She has no patience for this, for the man

sitting beside her now at the table, moving his arms

in slow, fluid motions, like a dancer, she thinks,

but not in a way meant to compliment him,