O

A YELLOW TAXI CIRCLES the airport; mist over LaGuardia; rumor of improvised explosive device; a bald Nigerian hack listening to incensed propagandists on WOR, his cab merging with the vortex; and behind the Plexiglas, an entrepreneurial American capitalist half his age, iPhone perpetually to her per fect pink ear, hair dark as a tiger’s stripe.

- Robert Boswell

“You could cut it with a knife,” she says. Having left a message with her lover, she speaks now to her sister. “That much is definite. The bomb is speculation.”

To which big sister petulantly replies, “Everything happens to you.”

The younger woman’s lover, in a Houston high-rise, listens to the message she left, thinking—he cannot help himself—that her flight isn’t really delayed but that she no longer loves him, the churning in his gut forcing him to pace the apartment. He ignores the window’s glittering panorama for the blank frame of the smartphone in his trembling hand, daring it to ring, demanding that it ring, although her calls do not actually ring now but roar, something she did the last time they were together, replaced the familiar bell with a great cat’s growl, a sound he imagines as he inscribes in the buttery carpet a path to speak his suffering: O! O! O!