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Josette

I reflected on Gabriel as I crouched on the rooftop and observed the stars. The wind whipped my tattered dress around my ankles as I looked over the faintly illuminated wreck of the city below me.

I had not seen him for days now: he would not see me, I knew, even if I wandered in the high wind from empty street to street. He had a way of hiding himself from me when he didn't want me near him. Or perhaps he would catch me fiercely in the wind and reprimand me and not cease until I was home, and then he would leave me again as dissatisfied as before.

(Has it come to this, then, in a lonely city, writing airy things, grasping for that which would elude me, fanning a light with too little fuel in a vain hope of rapture? I know you are there but you are so far away I can no longer feel the must for the forest around me or rest my head without feeling close, too close to traffic and rustling human life, and so I will write what has replaced you in my soul, this stark place which terrifies me but to which I have surrendered because there is no other home now.)

She remembered the terrible look on his face and his words, "Stay away from me." As though she pursued him and it was not he who trembled as he held her, who sought her out. It was he who long ago had wanted to marry her. But that was before he had disappeared without a trace and returned, changed, without explanation.

His look said he did not want her to stay away from him. Josette rose, disturbed, and exited the rooftop, descended the stairs to street level, and went out cloaked into the night.

The chapel was dark and still with no light save that she bore. She moved in the darkness to the altar and immediately felt suffused with warmth -- she knew that they were here again. She closed her eyes. "Tell me what I must do. I am alone now. Should I follow those who went before me to where they've gone? I know not where, but I will follow."

She felt watched and opened her eyes to see Stephen looking at her gravely. "You should not think of them anymore. They have not gone on -- they have been lost."

His statement was punctuated by the howling of a wolf.

"Then take me with you," Josette whispered, "if I may not go with them. I cannot be alone in an empty city. "

"In time, perhaps."

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

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