A Widow

Angela Ball

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After her husband died, at the age of fifty-five, she stayed on in their apartment, a spacious third-floor one-bedroom. The building was behind a church, and it was possible to climb out of the kitchen window onto a large, flat section of its roof. For many years she was seen circling its edge, often wearing a tartan scarf or coat that billowed if it was windy, a romantic figure rather like the French lieutenant’s woman, though not ruined and in no way expecting a sea officer’s return. One day she simply stepped off into thin air. People said it was selfish of her to create such a glaring mess on the sidewalk. Couldn’t she have taken pills or done something equally private and discrete? But perhaps we are entitled to the demise we find appropriate. She chose one in plein air that set sirens howling and produced whorls of red and blue light, bright and crisp as the calling cards people used to leave behind, their signatures in indigo.

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Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Grand Street, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her sixth and most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). She teaches in the Center for Writers, part of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.

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