Coughs and Barks

Coughs and barks. More barks than coughs. The coughs occasional, sparse; the barks incessant, incessant that is within a certain, for now ongoing, duration. You can tell that it is early night-time: by the general quietness and how the occasional sounds within carry with so little resistance. How each sound emerges from, sits atop, and slips back into a field of quietness, tonally one, like an Oriental watercolour, with that bed of almost silence. Even that barking, now stopped, felt not as a harsh dissonance but a punctuation of that movement into darkness and sleep. This isn't the middle of a desert after all. It's a world of mildnesses, not harsh absolutes. A car door closes. A figure heads down the street. The dog is off again. A distant rapping on a window.