Love In The Evening

By Yaschen Dlima

The old man stepped out of his front door in a hurry. The sky was reddening. He got into the first taxi he could find and told the driver to get him to the city square on the road that passes the old church tower within 5 minutes. Before the bell in the tower had rung the hour, the cab had reached the square where the evening birds flapped their wings and chirped sweetly above people who were walking in and out of stores and sitting on benches or in open air cafes talking to each other over cups of coffee. The taxi stopped. He saw her. Kate. Her simple brown face smiling to some old world secret that came to her that very moment when Jo sat in the taxi watching her behind the violently reddish streaks of dusk that reflected in the clear glass pane of the coffee shop she was sitting in. And he thought to himself how lucky I am to be with you, O dear, O Darling of mine I love you and how I love you.

But as he got off the cab, the world, as it seemed in all its voices and colours and faces, slipped beneath him and he fell to the ground flat! Face down, knees first, his head smashed into the brutal asphalt. his nose began to bleed. His face was cut all over, streams of blood running down a large red bruise across his cheek. He turned over his body to face the sky, slowly, to avoid any pain. But the pain came anyway, making him moan as he gasped for air. The sky that he now faced spanned crimson in every direction, and he saw her blush in her lovely red sundress that afternoon he took her to his favourite art gallery in town and bought red apples that were on sale for his grandmother who lived in a cottage nearby. He breathed deeply and quickly, frightened, panicking, blood escaping his body through his stained clothes. The sky. The crimson. A vision flooded.

Panic ringing in his ears. His life. Dripping away, quicker than the blood now pooling by the curb. She was the only one he loved. all his life, it was her, and only, her. He knew this as surely as he knew that the light was slipping through the cracks in the sky. One fall was all it took to kill him. Who knew? he guessed, everybody. His 84th birthday was a week away. Life was coming to its end. Sooner than he thought. Katherine, sipping a macchiato while waiting for the chocolate croissant she ordered not more than 2 minutes ago, watched Jo fall out of the taxi. She dropped the white ceramic cup to the floor and rushed out of the shop to the side of her friend who lay bleeding away on the street. She found him shaking all over, growing paler with each passing second. They looked each other in the eye like lovers who had forgotten just how much they loved each other. The sky still burned red. A crowd began to gather when Kate took Jo's hand in hers.

She let a tear fall down her frigid wrinkled cheek, and remembered how she and Jo would walk down Rue Montorgueil in Paris past the bakeries and bistros and fish stores and produce stands in the narrow street and laugh in the sun and talk of the time they spent lounging on the beaches of Kerala in the summer after university ended. He watched her cry and held her hand tightly like he would when they were 21 and alone in his bedroom, and he smiled the smile of one who knows he breathes his last breaths. The sky turned blue, dark, like the ocean in the night. In the distance the wailing of an ambulance was heard over the flapping of evening birds far up in the thickening blue. She bent down to kiss him. It was then that he died.

By Yaschen Dlima