She sat there blinking against the harsh lamplight. He looked at her. An easy tumble of black upon pale shoulders. Slim wrists, slim neck, slim waist. Soft dancer's shoes.
She fidgeted. What? Do I have something on me?
The slight giggle in her voice. All good things left in that graying world boiled down and smelted into this laughing girl.
No. Just looking.
A fly clattered uselessly against the window. Outside, two children bickered, their voices sexless and loud. She closed the blinds and stood there silhouetted against the muted streetlamp.
Wish it would rain.
Needs it.
He stood with his thumbs hooked dumbly in his pockets. Well, he said.
Well?
Nothing.
Her dancer’s frame caught in that sickly orange light, shifting from foot to delicate foot. A muse. A vision of some forgotten era in which poets and bards cried toothless to nobles and fat gods, sat crosslegged in mossgrown vales, heard the jackdaws and the crickets, scratched their supplicant songs upon scraps of birch and vellum, whispered their idiot’s prayers, and went on with their mendicant lives.
Okay. Can I get you anything?
            I’m okay. His mouth dry. His hands arthritic. Unresponsive.
She shrugged. Toyed with her bracelet, opened the blinds again. I guess I should go to bed soon.
I guess.
I’ll see you tomorrow though?
Yeah.
Her arms around his waist. That easy tumble of black, now upon his shoulder. He smiled. Thought of nothing else on his way home.
Dreamt of her--
She is chased through sprawls of yarrow and clover by an endless crowd of ragdressed lepers, bearing rusted agrarian weapons, a tangle of blades and curses, limping and stumbling through the fields like an eldritch curse, a cloud of purulent locusts. But she is smiling, clutching a bloom of trillium to her chest, running toward him, as if he were her long-absent father or lover returned from that which had stolen him, running fluid and light over the swells of sweetgrass and honeysuckle like an ancient nymph, eternal and beautiful.
            I brought these for you. She pushes the spray of white toward him.
            They are chasing you. Will you be safe? Shouldn’t you run?
            I think that maybe I have come to where I was running.
            And the throng reaches them, overtakes them, lifts them up with bleeding hands like an offering to some obscene pantheon, propelling them onward with gleeful gasps and wheezes, their jaundiced eyes rolling and winking in the white sun. To what rotten moloch will she be borne by this blistered vanguard? What enemy lies in siege outside its gates?