Arrival
She came in still wearing the cap, you understand, the leather one with the goggles pushed up, as though the wind off the field had followed her through the doors. The fan she carried was lacquered black and she never once opened it. We took her coat. She looked up at the ceiling for a long while and said only that the plaster reminded her of cloud the colour of milk.
Settling
Nobody asked him to play; he simply drew the instrument toward him the way a tired man pulls a chair to a fire. The first note went out flat against the panelling and came back rounder. He kept his eyes on a step in the gilt sunburst as though counting it, and the room, which had been a roomful of voices, became a roomful of listening.
Contemplation
There is a woman who keeps a heron in her memory the way other people keep a pocket-watch, and tonight she described it to a stranger: the long grey patience of it, the way it waits in shallow water and is not bored. She held her two fingers up as if a small wren had landed there, and for a moment everyone believed it had.
Accounting
He keeps the book the way a gardener keeps a hedge — not for the pleasure of the numbers but for the shape they hold. Each evening's small dramas are entered in a hand so even it looks engraved: who arrived, who lingered, which chair wanted mending. He once said the ledger was the only honest mirror in the building, and then turned a page so the ink would not smudge.
Departure
And then she danced — not for an audience, only because the floor between the two pale columns asked to be crossed in a particular way. One arm to the cornice, one arm to the door, the skirt going round a half-second after she did. When she stopped she was already at the threshold, and she went out into the cold the way a note goes out of a phrase: complete, and gone.