The clicking of her heels on the asphalt was the only sound surrounding her thoughts, as she walked down the street, at an hour when she always felt on top of the world. It was over, the feeling was gone, it was not that long ago they had met and the feeling was already gone. Her firm steps were guiding her heart to a stronger and reassuring beat, as they echoed up the narrow street, though cruelly pebbled, still appreciated by the romanticism attached to the architectonics of the age now passed. She was free and freedom tasted to reality. Shoes in hand, her feet felt cold. A snow flake landing on her nose took her back from melancholia, yet, another story that soon will belong to the past, with no special importance attached, living in her heart. The door from the bar, she had left behind, opened, letting out some recent former partners on the art of casual encountering, and, with them, muffed rhythms of the night, which, down there, often got a little stretched into brighter hours of the day. She grasped the leftover sounds and danced back and forth with time, for, though the feeling was gone, she was not quite yet ready to move on, and, she might as well, just for a short while, stay within the year of the cat with the Lucies in the sky.

One for the road. Short-story from 12 o’clock-tales and after hours thoughts. The book