In her left hand she held a glass of Pinot, in her right the TV remote. She kept forgetting she was holding the glass, but then her onyx bracelet would chime against the stem and recall it to mind and she would take a sip, only dimly aware of the way the light from the TV tinted the pale gold liquid with a chlorinated hue. The second floor of the brownstone was dark, as she’d also neglected to turn on the lights when the daylight had drained from the windows. The object of her fixation was a 36” flat screen in a mahogany armoire. On a normal night, its doors might never be opened. She liked the cabinet more than the technology it housed and preferred reading to television. She watched movies and news occasionally and certainly could have afforded a bigger screen if she’d wanted one, but she’d been happy to surrender the big wall-mounted unit in the divorce, happy to buy a smaller one and stow it behind dark-wood panels. The idea of orienting an entire room of her home around a shrine to the idiot lantern repulsed her.
