Under Glass

The cold morning light was the soft grey of a dove's breast feathers. Old Delpha, old lady stood on the wintry street corner, looking at the construction site that had been sprouting there for the past few months like a stop-motion film; of ice crystals, maybe, growing branch by angular branch upon each other like frozen towers.

Kneeling on the second-floor girders of the skeleton building, a welder flipped her mask down and put her lit torch to a joist. A hissing tongue of blue flame jutted. To the burring sound of the torch scouring the metal--a tongue-lashing, Delpha giggled to herself--a myriad motes of orange light sprang from the join, fountaining red-gold to the ground. A flock of fat pigeons descended eagerly on the sparks, wings pumping them whup-whup-whup down. They quarreled and jostled for space, pecked up the glowing embers as quickly as they could.