Night Fright

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She knew all the early-morning sounds of the city. The clink of bottles in the grayness, the rubbery snuffle of the patient horse that pulled the silent cart, the hoarse hooting of the early river tugs, and the first rustling of traffic that would deepen to a daylong roar. These were sounds she welcomed after the night silences, after the long, slow terror of the night, and when the hot summer days were well started, she could then fall asleep. It was not good sleep, though, and her weight was going down and her nerves shrilled and crawled along her body.

The summer had been planned for so long and so carefully, and now it was nightmare. The deposit on the cottage was lost, as were the days of mountain coolness and the frog sounds in the Adirondack night. She was a schoolteacher, and during other summers she had worked and she was tired, and this was to have been a summer of laziness, bought with the dollars that could have gone instead for clothes and books and plays and music.

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