It only comes out that way, he opened his mouth, and said, I’m quite mad, foreclosing it with a polite smile. His dog whines in another corridor to forget the cold puddled on the floor, trying to get out. Outside it is dark. Later, she was barking, and he would go wade out there in his socks to hit her on the head. The girl was all a dream for him, and he rode his own bike through warm floods of hope at night to find her. No wonder, he said in the mirror through his nose, alone, Is hunger all there is she knows.
June 1972