Eleven A.M.

Hopper paintings made her feel that time was smashing in on itself.  She knew, of course, that she would have to inhabit that imaginary space at some desperate moment in her future, but it wasn’t only that.  It was that she had already been there.  And she was there now, rolling coffee and smoke across her tongue and staring down at the linoleum.  She would always be there, sitting out in the dark with a halo of electric light all around her, eternally illuminated.

There was nothing she could do about it.