"A screaming comes across the sky." — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
He stopped because he thought that's what you did. She kept going for the very same reason.
The street had become a sluggish blur to both of them; each had eyes for the other only. Each felt only heart pain as the clasp of their hands loosened and was parted.
All sounds were muted: the clang of a streetcar a cracked bell; muffled sidewalk murmurs; the soft rustle of pigeon wings.
His mouth formed an O gape as he tried to call her back, tell her no; hers was a downcast wound as she silently implored him to keep up.
No matter.
Everything uncoupled and inconsolable. Sometimes this is how it ends.
***
She walked here on this earth, and she lived among the stars beyond her ancestors. If you had seen her liquid emerald eyes, folded with molten gold, you would have stood in one place forever, unable to move with the sorrowing weight of her grief and the burden of her arcane glamour. She will never return to this place, and her absence will prove calamitous.
Lovetar, Kali, Menhit, Lamia, Scylla and Charybdis, in your passing all colour fades, all song has fallen mute on brittle ears. We beseech you. Pain is a dance and truth is also a place. Come back to us. Even as the bay doors open, even as the poison seeds fall, even at the moment of our eradication.
***
Here we are in the violet night, spilling from our front doors, tumbling down our steps, hurtling into a riotous haze of utter disbelief.
***
She called herself Glass because most everyone looked through her and she was easily shattered. She had a single tattoo on her midriff, of an open window.
Between her skinny legs Montgomery breathed easy, safe and partway warm on concrete paving in his cocoon of threadbare denim. Government Street in April.
"Is your dog friendly?" A woman, thirtysomething.
"Monty. Sure," said Glass.
The woman reached to pet him, and Glass didn't breathe. Monty glanced at her and decided it was okay and extended his disheveled neck for a scratch, and then Glass breathed.
"I see you every day, and every day I think I should speak to you." The woman obliged Monty, who smiled, his pink tongue draped on his teeth, somewhere between solid and liquid. Glass said nothing, though she recalled the woman from the beauty salon a block or two away.
A man across the street yelled something over the early traffic. He sounded hoarse and weary.
"Look. It's not right you should have to lie on this sidewalk while folks no better than you drive by in luxury."
"Someone's gotta do it. May as well be me."
The woman sighed and stared at her. Glass wished she'd stop. She felt like she was transparent again and the woman was staring holes in the sidewalk. There was a silence that stretched too long.
"What do you want from me, lady? How about you give me a couple loonies and go on with your day?"
"I'll give you more than a couple loonies if you come help me clean up the salon."
Glass squinted up at her. The sun had moved higher, and the woman was a dark grey construction paper cutout. Glass thought she heard a herring gull cry, "Beware!" Monty made his teakettle sound of unease.
"Don't know nothing about beauty," she finally said, and a word came into her thoughts: exfoliate. Sounded like something to do with horse abortions. Yet it sounded pretty too. That's what was so weird about the world, pretty hiding inside all that ugly.
Across the street, the man yelled again, and Monty barked, once. This time, Glass heard the words.
"They did it. It's fucking happening!" There had been fear and astonishment in those words. And in Monty's short bark, there was a world of companionship and love and a lifetime of cold huddled nights and all the withstood scorn of passing strangers and the words oh please no oh please.
The pretty woman looked up, and she was a puzzled lens that concentrated the white and terrible sun as it fell toward each and everyone equally, the kind and the cruel.
None stood a chance. Not grifters, not bankers, not pimps, not actors, not teachers, not lovers, not empathetic beauticians, not streetworn kids and their tousled, loveable dogs. Not even, especially not, the dreamers of dreams.
***
She walked out of the infirmary, dragged her damaged limbs over moorland, mists swirling like her jettisoned conscience, the sun a rusted coin, the vast quiet dome of the sky above the earth hushed as the fading notes of a requiem.
***
After the screaming, the awful woe, and then the blessed silence.