Thousand: Six Hundred Fourteen

the air moved by her movement, and. And just then the door to the hall opens, and an old woman steps into the room. She is wearing the same gray, militaristic uniform as the girl. Her hair white and styled into curls the consistency of meringue, a hint of blush on her chalky cheeks, a faint, unnatural red on her lips as though youth were still tittering behind a curtain in the high school principal’s waiting room, which is down the hall from wherever she has ended up, the woman steps around the room’s possibly permanent occupant (“But everybody knows