setting to character assignment

From the syllabus:
This assignment will entail writing an episode that shifts the reader from the setting to the character.
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It had not rained in five weeks, give or take. You stepped through the door to take out the trash or give your dog a walk, and the dry heat hit you, bearing down like a red-as-hell demon angry and thirsty for your blood. The dry heat conjured visions, mirages in the streets and images in the sky, which a rational person dismissed in the wintertime. From the smoldering white sky, hanging over the city as it did —cloudless and yet somehow not restfully blue, just hot-white—from that sky emanated the profound lack of water that became the air one breathed day by day. That air was flat, odorless on the whole, but so dry it seemed to singe one’s nose hairs and make cotton out of one’s tongue.

The city was relatively green. Parks spotted its floor between its buildings like meadows dotting a great loblolly pine forest. Edging out toward the suburbs, the verdure billowed in oaks and sweet gums sheltering modest low-pitched roofs as well as the jutting turrets of the rich. The lawns, too, were a testament to place and wealth; the greener and more uniform the blades, the more distant from the interstate running through, and the closer to the city’s life-spring: money turned to fresh water coursing through its underground to sprinkler heads everywhere. Away from that pumping aorta, the land around a house changed from lawns to yards, whose main purpose was not to become green, but to be walked on and to be parked with cars or kids. The division along the grassline was a fairly reliable indicator of wealth and influence within the metropolitan city limits.

Marilyn Corvis inhabited the middle ground between the two extremes. Forty-something, unmarried, and a bit crusty, she lived alone comfortably with her cat Dorothy in a suburban flat that lived up to its name. Its floor was flat, its walls were flat, its parking lot was flat, and the flatness seemed give up the fight and let the dry heat in more easily. But it was what she could afford without being overly luxurious, and she was able to turn the air conditioning down to stave off the torrid day. She was also assiduous about taking two showers a day, sleeping with wet hair, and drinking over ten cups of water between waking and going to bed.

Marilyn had been a phlebotomist for twenty years. She had taken blood from citizens in the same clinic for the same oncologist day after day. Her relationship with that doctor and her fellow clinicians was tenuous at best, as she was fond of saying rather caustic things about their irrational habits. For example, she had not been afraid to rebuke the RN who used half a tank of gasoline and two hours a week driving to a specific cemetery on the north side of town to take care of her father's best friend's grave. Consequently, she generally kept to herself while at work.

Religiously, every Tuesday night, Marilyn met with her Christian Scientists, who provided her main social connection. Right now they were reading through the book of Exodus, about the Hebrews and their search for the Promised Land, which cultivated dairy cows and bees as its primary means of economic production. Last week they had discussed the method God had of leading his people out of the land of Egypt, including bringing plagues upon the Egyptians, and what the modern-day equivalent of those curses might be. Personally, Marilyn had the most trouble with the couple of verses regarding the Nile turning into blood. “Thus says the LORD,” she had read aloud last Tuesday. God was telling Moses what he should say to the Pharoah, ruler of Egypt. “‘By this you shall know that I am the LORD: behold, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall turn into blood. The fish in the Nile shall die, and the Nile will stink, and the Egyptians will grow weary of drinking water from the Nile.’”

She hadn’t been able to make any sense of it.