Interstice

She sang to me a couple of times, in a soft, smoky, deep-textured voice. Bits of blues songs she had written. Hopeless love, and fierce anthems of survival. Songs of an uncertainly assumed adulthood.

"That's lovely," I said. She looked at me as though she had missed a step in the dark.

Sometime after midnight I said I had to get to bed. We hugged, a little awkwardly, and she vanished into the night street. A few moments later I discovered her glasses on the kitchen table, beside her empty teacup. I trotted out onto the porch with them, but she was already gone.