The Half-Nude

 

            There is a woman crying in the hallway.

I shed a dream, some airy drip of sleep and reason, and come to it: soft, punctuated by rattling fists on wood. I listen, unable to tell the direction from which the noise drifts. Rising, I open the door and see her, kneeling at a neighbor’s. She shakes, naked to the waist –not for me, but I watch.

I still think of her. Even in the basest of ponderates, where I wordlessly drape a robe over her shoulders and she repays my nobility with sex, she cries.