“What does it mean to you,” she asked him, “being No.15?”
I couldn’t answer her. Even if I hadn’t been distracted by her odd and direct manner, the fact that she was wearing a bright red color on her lips that dangerously exposed both her and me in the gray, anonymous street, and the throbbing, leaden pain in my knee where I’d fallen the night before—even without all these things, what would I have said anyway?
I had no idea why I was No.15, who decided I would be No.15, and what the future of No.15 was even supposed to look like.
She was attacking me with this question, and yet she did it in so righteous a manner that I couldn’t help but feel that she was trying to help me. I think, in the bleak shades of my years living in Neuenstadt, any attention that any one of us gave to another person living there, was so unexpected, so startling, that it seemed like an overture of love.
I think that day, when she asked me the question, her white face turned up against the sodden air and spotlighting me with those eyes, I think I imagined a future where No.15 would love and be loved.
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This is just fabulous writing! I love 'she was wearing a bright red color on her lips that dangerously exposed both her and me in the gray, anonymous street,' and 'any attention that any one of us gave to another person living there, was so unexpected, so startling, that it seemed like an overture of love.' These lines are just so original, so lovely. Great work!
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