Night Center

The amber streetlamp below cut across the closed chalk triangle I drew earlier. Inside the boundary, the rough concrete stayed untouched. I looked around the drainage edge and found a clean, dark glass marble half-buried under a dry seed hull. Kneeling down on both boots, I rolled it with my fingertips toward the geometric center of the three white lines. The sphere wobbled across a tiny ridge of aggregate, caught a grain of sand, and stopped dead in the exact middle. The distant lamp cast a sharp, twin point of golden light right through the curved glass, throwing a tiny ring of shadow inside the perimeter. I sat back on my heels against the cool masonry to watch it settle.