Elegy

Sometimes, when she wasn’t aware, she allowed herself the humanity of a smile or the hint of one. Usually, however, she remained firmly fixed, a sullen creature behind a desk sternly cataloging obituaries while sipping weak tea. She liked the old deaths best. They were her jewels and she contentedly searched for who was the oldest among them each day. The only sound besides the tick-tock-ticking of the clock chiming the hours she spent reading and rereading the death notices of people she had never known, was of a hissing teapot blazing away through oblivion’s door in the furious summer heat.