Sheer Fabric, Easily Torn

She let slip a small, anguished yelp, Ann did, as she descended the second step, past the offending hornbeam branch peering impetuously (like a furtive schoolboy spying on the neighbour's girlchild) through the vertical bars of the railing. Ann cast a despairing look at the torn stocking, a stocking she valued not so much for its innate worth as for its careful concealment of her too-pale pallor, a concealment she could now recover only by running upstairs to fetch a replacement pair.

She glanced back at the closed door of her brownstone to fix it in place, as if it could have somehow retreated during her too-hasty descent, then again at the violated garment. All around her the golden leaves of autumn floated toward the ground, reflective in their brilliance.

"Well, isn't that fucking great ?"

The board meeting was at five, she'd never make the crosstown bus, and she was certain Jeff was sleeping with someone else. By Someone Else, she knew, she meant Eleanor.

Ann turned her gaze, now growing in warm intensity, to the sidewalk five steps below. Three doors down, on the other side of the street, a muffled thud as an overcoated businessman (stockbroker ?) took leave of his yellow cab - that travelling refuge of the harried New Yorker.

A flash rose to her cheeks like the first, tentative spurts of a nascent volcano - unthreatening in intensity though capable of inflicting harm; more potent in their signal of what lay beneath. She cut an arresting figure poised so delicately between home and street, the calf-length earth-brown overcoat and her thin lovely face (oh, that delicate nose ! and those amber eyes !) like a framed jewel in some museum display.

Yet what jewel could burn so brightly, light itself from a place so deep within ?

The flush in her cheeks was pronounced now, the amber eyes liquid with a coalescing fury, no - rage.

Compelled by a will not consciously expressed her hand had sought the clasp of the shoulder-slung Hermes bag, had drawn itself to the silver device secreted within. Graceful, thin digits better suited to smoothing order into long auburn hair stiffened into razor-tipped stilettos, punched a staccato rhythm on the phone's keypad.

She waited, and roiling galaxies far, far away spawned new planets (just husks with molten cores, for now, but later, planets).

"Eleanor," she hissed, "You can take this job and go Fuck Yourself. I quit".