He sits at his desk smoking a cigarette, a window cracked to let in the cold air. The night is long and still, and somewhere across the snowy city, a bell tolls the time.
The woman in his bed has dark hair, spilling in curls across the pillows. She sleeps with her knees almost to her chin, her arm curved gently around her stomach, as if naturally protecting an unborn child.
He writes a string of thoughts in the journal open on the desk. It’s rubbish. He never does good work at this late hour, but always he thinks. Breathing in and out, the bell tolling across a quiet city. The cigarette is almost finished. A glass ashtray is on the windowsill, next to the basil plant she bought for him. She put the leaves in the pasta she made for dinner tonight, humming a rich melody while the noodles boiled in the pot and chicken roasted in the oven. The windows in his one-bedroom flat steamed up in the heat, and her face flushed while she hummed and sliced basil from the plant at the window. She moves quietly whenever he’s writing; she never wears shoes in his apartment, not even when the wood floor grows cold at the onset of the winter. She doesn’t notice when she hums. The tune sounds like a lullaby.
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