Maria Blinked Maria blinked. She was lying spread-eagle on a linoleum floor. She hadn't been sleeping though.

Through a small triangular hole in the roof she watched the blue. The blue had grown out of the black. She'd seen it. It didn't spread from one side to the other, the blue from the black, it just happened, too slowly to notice. Black one moment and then, awaking from a drifting thought, suddenly blue. She'd seen the dark of a moonless night occasionally interrupted by a passing star's momentary alignment with that triangular hole. The light of the stars had progressively defined the boundaries of her hole. She knew it well. A broken corner on a cracked terracotta tile, approximately isosceles with a jagged edge. It was almost time. She was waiting for the sun to cross her hole, for the shaft of light to crawl from the base of the wall near her head over her hair and across her left eye and cheek, just grazing her neck before returning to the indifferent floor. She anticipated the warmth of its path, either remembering or imagining the heat just beginning to radiate from the triangular projection before it passed on to a new landscape. She was tired--hadn't moved since yesterday, since just before the sun had last crossed her face. For someone else, it might have seemed melodramatic. It might have been melodramatic. For Maria, it was the opposite. It made her feel a part of the desert, timeless, unchanging. Sprawled motionless on the floor, she was an object, a compatriot of the biggest star and the smallest particle of dust, equal in greatness and insignificance. She focused on the insignificance; it was more comforting. This was a land without memory. There was a history here but time passed through and ran off. The desert was indifferent. Her hair grew increasingly hot against her scalp. She smiled slowly. Her back relaxed even further into the floor. The smile halted. The triangle of light passed across the edge of her forehead and down onto her ear. And then, so soon, it was gone, crawling across the cold floor.

She rolled up slowly, stiffly, and got to her feet, socks slick against the worn ground. Padding to the west wall, she bent down, left hand supporting her tailbone, and grabbed a half stick of white chalk. She scrawled the number four beneath the large number three already there, then dropped the chalk. Walking over to the concave, sweat-stained mattress in the corner she surveyed the single room. It was bare--in a different mood, spartan. A mattress, blankets, a slowly rusting barrel of water. Half a loaf of crusty bread sat next to a cup on the floor. No other signs of food or habitation. No pictures, although she had twice regretted not bringing a particular one. She grabbed a cigar box from its place next to the head of the mattress and walked, still stiff, through the screen door. It swung back in place sharply behind her, bounced slightly against the frame, and settled into its familiar position. Maria, in turn, stretched once and settled down on the edge of the stoop. She looked out towards the horizon, vision unobstructed except by the heat--hazy, tangible, distorting. If someone had happened past the sagging shack at exactly that moment, Maria might have gone unnoticed, so well did she conform to her surroundings. She had a resigned beauty about her, especially in the tired wrinkles surrounding eyes once well-versed in joy, an abandoned Migrant Mother perhaps. She looked down at the cigar box in her lap and smoothly, without hesitation, opened the lid. With serene calm, she removed its contents, and setting the box aside, considered the instrument. Her lips were determined, her eyes indifferent. She shot her right kneecap. Cried out. Fell back. Laughed once, harshly. She looked into the blue, blindly grabbed the instrument again, unclenched her teeth, placed the barrel on her tongue, and squeezed the trigger.