Summer was still very young.
Did you know forget-me-nots were that tiny?
They climbed the hill behind the cabin, listened to the birds, checked the guide to identify their calls.
He didn’t want to give her the little flowers because they both listened to names so carefully.
They talked about the conduct of parting. This to lovers is as remote and interesting as a discussion of H-bomb defence at a convention of mayors.
“… and if it isn’t working for one of us, we’ve got to tell the other.”
“… and let’s hope we have the courage to be surgical.”
Shell was delighted by a certain cluster of birch.
“They look like naked trees! They make the woods look black.”
At night they listened to the sound of the lake beating the sand and shore stones. A dark luminous sky made of burned silver foil. The cries of birds, wetter and more desperate now, as though food and lives were involved.
Shell said that every sound of the lake was different. Breavman preferred not to investigate; he enjoyed the blur of happiness. She could listen more carefully than he. Details made her richer, chained him.
“If you tape their whistles, Shell, and slow them down, you can hear the most extraordinary things. What the naked ear hears as one note is often in reality two or three notes sung simultaneously. A bird can sing three notes at the same time!”
“I wish I could speak that way. I wish I could say twelve things at once. I wish I could say all there was to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”
He worked while she slept. When he heard her easy breathing he knew the day was sealed and he could begin to record it.
A queer distortion of honesty holds me back from you …
Shell made herself wake up in the middle of the night. Moths battered against the window beside which he worked. She crept behind him and kissed his neck.
He wheeled around in surprise, pencil in hand, and scraped skin from her cheek. He upset the chair as he stood.
They faced one another in the cold flat light of the Coleman lantern. The night was deafening. The whirring and thudding of the moths, the hiss of the lantern, the water working on boulders, small animals hunting, nothing was at rest.
“You thought you were alone!” she cried in pain.
“I thought I …” “You thought you were alone.” he recorded when she was asleep again.