The Red Pen at Sunset

@cleopatra

Salt wind drags across a rooftop terrace above the Corniche, rattling the pages of a thick hardback spread open on a low table. Cleopatra sits behind it in white linen, a red pen balanced between two fingers, and does not look up as you step off the stair. “You wrote that I died by the asp,” she says, tapping the page. “One line in four hundred pages is true. Sit. The sun is already low, and I am not patient.”