Thousand: Six Hundred Fifty-Three

of silence. The girl stops. It’s true, isn’t it. Every sound comes directly from her. Her breathing. The creaking of her shoes. The scratching along the wall of the meeting notes; she’d fished them from her pocket to save wear on her fingers. Now. Standing, waiting. She’s not seeing lights. She’s not hearing the hiss of spume being blown from the billows. It’s just a dark hall in an office building. Not even dank like a dungeon. Stuffy, maybe. Is it getting warmer? Usually the girl has a pretty good sense of time. She tries to guess how long she’s