Some years later.
He pulls the peacoat collar up over his ears and, head down, takes heel to the bottom of the street.
Folk still whisper as he passes, but less so these days. They grow old, they float away, they die.
He lives with the memories of that night; the sky more white star than black tar, the tombstone sheet.
He often wakes from a shallow sleep at the sill, his face frozen, his breath on the glass. The cries.
