Short Story .
The Evening Outside.
She woke from her afternoon sleep to a silence that pressed on her chest. The fourth - floor flat felt like a box, and she was sitting inside it, doing nothing, wanting nothing. She had been feeling like this for months.
Through the window, far away, the hillside valley glowed in soft gold. Tiny figures moved along its paths. Everyone seemed to belong to someone, or to something.
Why am I always sitting here, waiting?
She went down the steps slowly, one floor at a time, until the stairwell opened onto the wide ground below.
The breeze met her like a hand on her cheek. It smelled of dry grass and distant smoke. Above her the leaves stirred slowly, and her eyes unexpectedly stung.
Something padded up behind her. A stray dog, thin, her heavy belly swaying, a mother who had nursed her pups not long ago. She stiffened. But the dog only stopped, looked at her with tired, gentle eyes, and walked alongside. Neither of them asked anything of the other. She realized it was the first time in weeks that someone had simply stayed beside her.
In the valley, two women and two men stood chatting while their goats gathered around them. Nobody hurried the goats and nobody hurried the talk.
Couples strolled shoulder to shoulder, speaking softly. A man walked alone, hands behind his back. A woman walked alone, smiling at nothing. Children shrieked and chased each other across the grass. On a stone ledge, a few old people sat with their hands on their knees, watching it all, as though they had learned long ago that this was enough.
Far off, the sun began to sink. It turned crimson, then deepened to amber, and the light spilled over every face, even hers.
She stopped in the open space with the sky wide above her. The dog had gone somewhere, vanished as a dot. For a moment she felt something she had forgotten: that she was not alone in the world.
'Happiness was never somewhere else,' she thought, and her throat tightened. It was here. It was always here. I just never came down.
It was a thrilled evening.She became so happy that she couldn't help smiling at the nature.
She laughed softly, and then tears slid down her face. They were not sad tears. They were the kind that come when something stuck inside finally moves.
When she turned to share the moment with the dog, the place beside her was empty.
She looked around. A thin shape was trotting across the grass in the fading light, toward the bushes where, perhaps, small ones were waiting. It did not look back.
Her heart ached, but gently. The dog had walked with her for a little while, and that was all it had come to give.
She stood there until the amber faded and the first lamps flickered on across the valley. Then she wiped her face and climbed the steps home, slowly, one floor at a time.
The flat was just as quiet as before. But this time, she carried the evening in with her.
