The lady in gray 1/2

A night like others had gone by in a mild but only mildly exciting alcoholic rush as the woman in the blue dress sat down in the Café Verité somewhere in montrouge. Her silk dress looked like a blooming violet in a vase and her face was pale and once pretty. A red stain at the edge of her brown iris made the flawless white in her tired eyes imperfect and a fatigued look accompanied her order to the garçon. A man of small figure who had barely noticed the tall and slender lady walk into the nearly empty café at the near end of the night, somewhere in montrouge. When the man put her glass filled with red wine on to the small, round table on which only a black ashtray sat, it nearly stuck to the brown wood and a sweet odor of rum and wasted nights reached her nose. “I don’t know how many I had”, the woman in blue said. The garçon smiled. “Not enough yet to bare this city”. She smiled too now. “Are there ever enough to accomplish that?”.

The garçon now only grinned as he walked of after the wine had been served. His missing answer saddened the lady. She had hoped for the first honest answer that evening. A rare occasion in this city. And even if it were just a guess, it might have been an honest one. Something so often missed in the groups she spent time with. People who would never wear a blue dress to an empty bar just to be somewhere at night. With a silent smile the woman looked at the glass in front of her. How the transparent, subtle yellow of her wine looked as the dim light of the ceiling Lumiere hit it. The glass was yet again nearly empty as the first drops of rain knocked on the window of the café and the night grew colder. Nearly all the golden light that she once had seen in this city had vanished in the streets and a grayness quickly spread through the alleys and streets of montrouge as the wind increased. “A night like no others”, she said to herself, reciting out of her memory. Then she reached into the bag she carried and pulled out an old photograph. It smelled like the old postcards she liked to buy from the venders at the Seine and felt soft and fragile in her hands. Still, it tasted familiar when she rushed her lips against it, a mild sweetness. She knew everything about this picture, she was sure. So, she looked at it once more, adding one to a million. “There you are again, love”.