These Dreams of You

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Afternoon passes and night falls. From outside, rising from the crescent circle of Cartwright Gardens are the sounds of people returning from work, students from school, diners in nearby restaurants. From the pub halfway down the block comes a roar of approval; someone has scored a goal or try. In the park across the street a couple argue, more and more audibly; the guy is losing. If time is a child’s game of telephone, now at the end of the line a simple melody hummed in someone’s ear long ago is a din beyond human pitch, the ashen silence that blots out every song, when light isn’t the norm of things but an aberration in the black. Trying to pull Sheba to her, Viv feels this calamitous silence pass over, the room enveloped by that momentous passage to which every life bears witness at some time and stands vigil, before it finally is itself borne witness to, and the subject of the vigil of others.