Sound inside

The Sound Inside 8/23/19 49
Epilogue
BELLA(to AUDIENCE)
When I wake up, some seventeen hours later, Christopher’s gone.
The second and third hypos are resting on the chair where he was sitting
beside my bed, their syringes still full, untouched.
I shuffle out to the kitchen and see that the stationery box containing
Christopher’s novella is still on the table.
I remove the lid. I read the cover page, which I only half-noticed the first
time:
To Lie Facedown in a Field Full of Snow.
Nothing else.
A work of fiction attributed to no one and without a copyright line.
Oh, and a short epigraph on the other side of the title page:
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to
interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word is
spoken.”
–Fyodor Dostoevsky
BELLA(to AUDIENCE)
Christopher doesn’t show up in class that week. His body was found by a
fellow student, on the New Haven Green, in the middle of the night. He was
lying facedown in the snow. The cause of death, hypothermia. He was
wearing his gas station attendant jacket. No hat, no scarf, no gloves.
*
His death is hardly known around campus. It’s barely a footnote, scarcely
legible.
It turns out that he’d been attending his other classes more and more
infrequently as the fall term came to its end; one class not at all.
His other professors barely knew him.