These Dreams of You

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The storm is picking up when she reaches the ballroom of the hotel. Enough of the eucalyptic wind from outside finds its way through some hidden breach to rustle the room’s potted fronds and small dingy chandeliers turned down low; Viv buys a glass of tej, the moonshine honeywine once made by Sheba’s grandmother. She drinks it down, buys another.

He took too long to say no. He said it too many times. To clear a space in the middle of the large ballroom, its round tables have been pushed to the walls with such abandon the wind might have blown them there, and the room churns with five or six hundred otherworldly-looking Ethiopians with their african skin and european features dancing to half a dozen musicians on a bandstand at the room’s far end. Viv buys another glass of tej: Who is she? the woman in the photo, and if she’s dead and has nothing to do with Sheba then why show me the photo at all? and, watching the dance, immediately she knows she’ll never know.