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I recognized her symptoms. The hollow night was too seductive and the seductions it recalled too recent not to agonize. The air was cool, then warm against the skin; it felt like sheets being used up by a body as it rubs and sheds its sense against their folds, twisting towards the always elusive rest which has lately begun to hang somewhere over the foot of the bed and must be wooed like the moon, and has been nearly won, when mercilessly, through the window, the lilac administers another draught, and the lonely body chokes to recollect the fall of a woman's heavy clean long hair across its avid shoulders. Now I recognized the girl: like me, she'd been seduced and dropped, by what woman and when I didn't know—for all I knew her love was unrequited. But sure enough, finally noticing my gaze she recognized me too—in that small school, she may have known my small story in detail—and I wasn't what she'd been looking for; or else, in some strange way, I was, because in a gruff voice she said, "Fine. Let's go. I don't walk to talk about it anymore," and went inside. Her bewildered mother glanced at me, then followed. And I thought, Oh sister. Oh well. |