Monday morning

I woke to false dawn, the sky paling to blue. Now the sun creeps higher, but I'm facing away from it and can only see the world take on gold. A streamer of wispy white, its edges barely discernible from the aquamarine sky, drifts slowly past on the morning wind. Everything else is gold.

The weathered palisade fence around the back yard next door surrounds the rusted Ts of an old clothesline no one uses, the wires between broken strands of rusted wire dangling and silent. Backs and sides of buildings on either side of the alley droop and sidle next to each other as though worn and weary from holding the line while the scratching claws of a lone tree arch above the gilded roofs. It's a lonely sight, these empty-eyed buildings, dark and blind, covered in layers of dust standing in idle silence in a world where nothing moves except the wispy streamer of white across the brightening blue sky now gone from the narrow view outside this window.

Even the streets are empty. There is no sound but the mechanical creaking whir of the furnace and the rush of tepid air across my shoulders. And all the rest is silence.