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By Root 375 0

glass, extinguishing the hawk in midflight. A team of doctors and technicians rushed to the woman’s side. Carol Ann shielded her eyes as they worked over her body with their equipment, saying things like, “She’s in full arrest, cardiac and respiratory,” and, “Sunglasses! I need some sunglasses here!” and, a few minutes later, “S.C.D. at four … thirteen. You can stop now, Miriam. I’ve called it.” One by one the doctors left, and the room fell quiet. The outlines of the shadows began to soften again. The light arising from the woman’s bed slowly dwindled until her skin held only a cool spectral glow, like phosphorescent moss in a cave. Carol Ann did not have enough faith in her powers of observation to tell exactly when the light winked out, only that there came a moment when it appeared the woman’s pain was no longer radiating from her body. Her hair had been freed from beneath her back. She lay with her eyes closed, her lips parted as if to take a breath. Once again, it seemed, she was confined to the borders of her flesh.

When the same orderly who had helped Carol Ann drink from the Evian bottle that morning came to box up the woman’s possessions, Carol Ann stopped him from taking the journal. She slid it to her own side of the cabinet and pinned it down with her bad hand.

“No, that’s mine.”

The orderly shrugged. “If you say so, ma’am.”

He turned his back to her as he finished his work, avoiding her eyes as he emptied the woman’s lunch tray, folded her blanket, and with the help of another orderly hoisted her onto a gurney. Carol Ann knew that she would probably never see him again, and also that it would not matter if she did, for in that instant she had become a thief to him.

Soon after she left the hospital, Carol Ann developed a preoccupation with her wound, testing it a dozen times a day for signs of light and pain. Dr. Alstadt had warned her to avoid the temptation, but she could not resist it. At work or at home, whenever the thought crossed her mind, she would remove the glove splint from around her thumb so that she could trace the cut with her index finger. Her nail had grown over the top line of the incision, but the front and the sides were still exposed, and a narrow welt had formed there, healing up around the stitches. The pain was not as pronounced as it had been before, and neither was the light, but if she bent her thumb just right, guiding it into the injury, it would begin to radiate from the inside, pink and warm, showing a tiny net of capillaries and a curved silhouette of bone. It reminded her of the sleepover parties she used to attend when she was in elementary school, how all the girls would take turns shining a flashlight through their hands, making their palms sway around in the dark like Japanese lanterns. When she was finished examining herself, she would put the glove back on and seal the straps, and she would think about the hospital and the stand of pine trees and the tranquillity the blue pills had brought her, and if she was at home she would let her eyes drift to the light from the window, and if she was at work, to the light from the computer. She was employed by a subscription news service, compiling accounts of the day’s major stories for various players in the stock and banking industries. Every day she devoted a portion of her assortment to what people had begun to call the Illumination. There was the story of the presidential task force that had been formed to investigate the phenomenon. The story of the Midwestern teenagers cutting luminous tattoos into their skin. The story of the Korean scientist who had spliced a gene of fluorescent jellyfish protein into a feline embryo to create a kitten that glowed in the dark. The story of the Palestinian suicide bombers who interpreted the footage of their brothers’ lives ending in an explosion of golden mist as a sign that their cause was blessed by the Lord. She knew that some of these incidents would have no foreseeable effect on the marketplace, but since neither her boss nor her clients seemed to object to them, she kept including