In the Interim

No more Books on Windowsills no. 4; Cork City Diaries XXI and Interim XXIII

Sun slams the ledge now, hinged no more by paperbacks’ split spines, where a dense stack used to stand absorbing afternoon slants of stormy springs and sunsick August afternoons. Pale, circular stains sit on the browned paint of sills and lockers like shallowprints left by years lying side by side. A windowsill and a bedside locker are always the first and final gathering places for the domestic smallness of living somewhere: a half-read open book turned face down, a cold coffee mug, and a receipt holding the spot of a chapter intended to be finished before the season turned and the item could not be returned.

[IN THE INTERIM — EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Is it the tail end of Sunday night bleeding into the dusk, or the cold, sharp edge of Monday morning already breaking through? Time gets slippery here. Between the high-gravity tracks and a fleeting, two-minute cinematic detour through Moonstruck, pilot the space where hours lose their anchor.

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Optimise. Align. Transcend. Step into the digital slipstream and claim your unfair advantage at ouradoom.com/interim.]

Across the floor, a plastic cat carrier sits near the radiator. Two ceramic bowls rest on the tiles: one blue, the other white. Both are rinsed; both are dry. When the door slams, the draft rattles the window frame—once, then several times. Without the titles lined against the glass—the party poetry, detective stories, and portraits of the mob—the windows look wider and taller now, so that later that same afternoon, when rain smatters to fizz on its way down to square ground uninterruptedly, I know it is time to settle the books. Sorting now not by author or tone, but weight and fit. All the ones with yellowed pages, tindered and bent at the corners, read once and reread any number of times, now lie flat in grey plastic, wrapped tight so the corners don’t catch the wet of transit.

I fold the flaps, press the tape, and the next moment the ledger looks as if belonging to someone else entirely—another sentence with changed characters’ faces and other given names. A slate waiting for a stranger’s teacup and an unread paperback. Down the street, a car slides away from my pathway, its tyres whooshing over the wet tarmac until the sound dissolves into the flat. I smooth out the glue, tape, and paper, fixing them until the last air bubble finds the edge.