But it was such a silly dream, with no meaning that she could figure out. How could you explain the yelling and sweating and the scared restlessness that always followed these dreams? It happened time after time, and it didn't make sense.

Erika slept, her slight chest rising and failing smoothly under the blanket, the curve of her neck white in the street light that crept in under the ill-fitting shade. Kate turned over and lay looking at her, unable to relax, yet too tired to put her thoughts in any kind of order.

Only a few days, yet she knew every line of Erika's face and body and every inflection of her voice. The way her wrists and ankles were made of small fine bones neatly joined together, and the slope of her back and the flat stomach and the barely perceptible rise of her breasts. She knew the intensely tender look in Erika's face when they made love. There was no part of her that wasn't dear and familiar.

My hands know her, Kate thought, and my eyes and my mouth, too. Things begin to happen when she gets home after work. The rest is only waiting. When she touches me, I come alive.

But she couldn't tell Erika about her dream.

There's nothing to tell.

There's so much that can't be told.

The words sounded in the room. She looked at Erika. But Erika was asleep, her mouth turned up as though she were thinking about something pleasant.

Kate sat up, careful not to touch Erika. She reached under the edge of the bed for cigarettes and lit one, her hand shaking a little. The circle of fire was comforting in the gloom.

It was starting again. For a long time—it seemed like a long time, so much had happened in the last few days—she had been safe. Reading, going for walks alone in the daytime and after supper with Erika, doing the simple marketing together. Everything led to the time when they would be together, with the rest of the world shut out. She had felt so free this morning, starting out to look for work. Maybe now, at last—?

She sat huddled over, her knees pressed together and her elbows held close to her sides, her neck rigid, her while body tight with the effort to keep from shaking. Her mouth felt thick and evil. She couldn't swallow.

Paul.

Paul in the too-loose uniform, hanging on the rack of skin and bones he'd become in that place. His hair cut short and the dreadful humble, nervous look in his eyes. She knew they gave them tranquilizers, medication—but it was his look of knowing that frightened her, as though he remembered everything and could find no hope anywhere.

Paul, silent in the face of her nervous chatter, taking the candy and cigarettes from her without comment and holding them as though he neither knew nor cared what they were. Paul, clearing his throat when he said goodbye in that toneless voice. Paul—she thought about him on cold winter nights when sleet banged against the windows of her cheap rented room. Paul, locked into a cell, imprisoned by steel and concrete more cruel that the elements. And in the hot summer finding his only exercise in a paved enclosure with no blade of grass to remind him of the living world outside.