Page 25 of Hunger

I'm at the ledge in under a minute. The rosin boxes are gone. The ledge is empty except for the thin drift of snow that's gathered along the inside corner.

She found them.

The thought arrives with a force that's disproportionate to the simple fact of it. She found them. She brought them inside. She held them in her hands.

I work the latch and step through.

The room is dark.

She's in the bed.

I look at the desk.

The three rosin boxes are stacked there, and the violin case is open on the floor.

I crouch beside it. The case is open and the violin is inside, still wrapped in its soft cloth, the bow in its slot along the lid. The case is sitting in the middle of her floor as if she's set it down and forgotten about it. She hasn't forgotten about it. She's opened it. The dust along the seam is gone. The latches have been disturbed. She opened it tonight or last night or sometime in the last day, for the first time in many months.

The thing in my chest that I've been calling hunger isn't hunger. I don't know what it is. It has shape and weight. It presses against the inside of my ribs and it doesn't move.

I rise from the case.

I cross to the bed.

She's on her side. Her hand is tucked under her chin and a single strand has worked loose against her cheek.

I lower myself to my knees beside the bed.

I've been here three times now. I've looked at her face three times now in the half-light of streetlamps through curtains. Each time I've looked, the looking hasn't been enough. Tonight the looking isn't enough either. Tonight the looking is worse than not enough.

I want to touch her.

The wanting is in my hands. They haven't touched a thing in love or kindness in millennia. They've torn and they've clawed and they have killed but they haven't touched. They want to touch.

I look at the strand that's come loose against her face.

I lift my hand. A claw is a quarter inch from the loose strand of her hair,, and I can feel the warmth of her face on the back of my finger.

She sighs in her sleep. I lower my hand, drawing it back to my side. I'm still on my knees beside the bed. Close, but not close enough.

I look at her. I look at her face and her hand and her hair on the pillow and the thin white scar on the back of her left hand that I noticed the first night I came here. I look at all of these things and the wanting doesn't lessen. It grows. It grows until it's enormous in the small room.

I have to leave.

I don't want to leave.

I have to leave.

I rise and cross to the window. The latch gives under my hand. I step out onto the ledge and close the window behind me, slow and exact — even though my hands have started to shake.

I climb down. I stay in the snow at the base of the building, but the shaking doesn't stop.

I look up at her window. The window is dark. The curtain is closed. She's in the bed she's been in for the last hour. She's sleeping. She doesn't know I was there.

I almost touched her.

A few hours ago I was forty miles away pulling memories out of an old woman's head in a kitchen that smelled of tea. A few weeks ago I was a thing that drifted at the edges of small towns and fed without thinking and felt nothing. Now I'm standing in a parking lot in Nebraska with my hands shaking because a sleeping woman exhaled in her sleep.

I don't know what's happening to me.