A Circle, Freehand

In Republic Square, under the oaks lit from below, a woman with a tired dog holds her phone up to the dog's collar, where an aluminum tag hangs with a hole punched in one end. It is stamped 119. Under the number, in a hand that leans: later.

She turns the phone to you. The screen is a circle drawn freehand in pencil, rubbed out and drawn again so many times that the paper under it has gone shiny. Nothing is written in it. In the corner of the screen it says 11:41.

She has drawn it every night since the tag was stamped, she says, because the tag says later, and tonight is the 119th, and it is still not round.

Then she looks at the corner of the screen and says there is another lantern, tag 241, in a window on Comal, that goes dark at midnight. She would rather not scan it alone.