A written description of a library of sorts in a house outside Listowel in County Kerry, Ireland

I sit hunched over a table laden with books, two selfsame cups (large, white, cartooned with gardening instruments - a bamboo stick on the handle is labeled "citizen cane"), my computer, a few magazine cuttings and this, my writing notepad. Painted butterflies and flowers dance across the tabletop. My chair, too, is awash with flowers, but these are black silhouettes, stylised. Cream bookshelves line the walls, the books have been organised tastefully (and, perhaps, by topic, though loosely) and are interspersed with numerous candles, a marble chess set whose pieces lie in a jumble, an accordian my mother played as a child, many framed photographs (family mostly, one of dad with his boss and their prestigious Ernst & Young award) and, finally, taking a central position on a shelf it has entirly unto itself is a large clock with a gold face and, as a base, a naked woman lying prone (serene, smiling, hand raised) bathed in folds or waves - a billowing darkness - with a winged cherub of sorts flying towards her from the other side of the clock's face, its waist wrapped, too, in these curious flames of darkness. A newspaper cutting lies half-exposed atop a pile of books (Madame Bovary, Mrs. Dalloway and a collection of modern French short fiction compiled by one of my lecturers and an old colleague of his). Boran's book on creative writing conceals half the cutting, revealing only the top quarter of a reddish-orange wing and a headline, several parts of which have been cut out, leaving only:

"____ Nest Is Empty_ Enjoy Each ____ "

The ticking of the clock (whose hands indicate that it is seventeen minutes past eight, while my watch tells a time nine minutes ahead of this) and the faraway noise of my father and my sister making the dinner punctuates the languid silence of the room.