A bird is hopping in the sun-glanced grass, its cries carrying through the still spring air to where they are. With the late afternoon sunlight a thought comes to her mind: "I see, in evening air..." It's a quote. Something scrawled across the title of a piano piece, just above the place where the tempo is written.

"I see, in evening air, how swiftly dark comes down on what we do." Theodore Roethke.

It's a simple piece. She loves it. Once, the first time she played it, she added accidentals. They made it sound minor instead of major. But they were wrong (Does that make them accidental accidentals? she wonders). She likes the minor better than the major keys. She listens to the little bird cry out.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks. His voice is like a young thing, a little fox.

She tells him. "I like the minor keys better, do you?"

"In music?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. I like them both, I suppose." He doesn't play music anymore. She does, even if she has no reason to.

"Why don't you like music anymore?"

Little fox eyes in a little fox face. "I like music all right. Why do you think I don't like it?"

"You don't play it anymore. Listening to the radio does not count."

His laugh makes his teeth show. "You're a funny thing." He kisses her nose.

The grass is golden and green and yellow, and more green. When the sun shines through it, that is when she likes it the best. When the colors are golden and bright green. Far away, in someone else's field, the grass is tall and thin. Long, lanky grass. Where a fox could hide. "Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards." Is that the way it goes? What was that from?

He points to the faraway field. "Look," says his soft, soft voice.

The grass waves and makes ripples on the hills. "Like an ocean," he says. He knows it is her favorite. She told him when they were driving, her mouth moving slightly around the words, making sound out of thoughts as they meandered uselessly through her mind. She looks at the faraway field with her faraway eyes.

"Soon it will be gone, all gone." She blinks.

"What?"

"Nothing. Nothing useful." She looks at him with blinking eyes and watches his shoulders tensing up like an animal's haunches. He stretches and yawns wide. In the dusky pale shadows he looks like a cool gray cutout, cut out of the sun. She leans back slightly to see where the light falls across his form. The golden light on his back makes him look strong and bright, rippling like the faraway field.

Suddenly she feels as if she wants to chase him.

"I will have to say good-bye, you know," he says. As it is getting late.

"I know. The sun is still out, though."

He smiles warmly like the sun. "Yes, but it is slowly getting dark."

Slowly, she thinks. Oh. It is slowly, not swiftly. How slowly dark comes down on what we do. Roethke.

"I will say good-bye, then, first," she says. She smiles, wildly pretty. Feeling the sun glow upon her face. She hopes that the wild smile attracts him, secretly.

It does. He leans forward, muscles tensing like something about to pounce, and makes signals to her skin with his lips. How slowly...

Her hand caresses his lean, foxlike chest for a moment, then draws away. "Good-bye," she says. Little fox.

He breathes the scent of her, a smell of apples, carried by the wind. "Good-bye." Strange, how sudden she is. The aroma evaporates into a thousand shards of air.

"When we are alone, it is such a strange paradise." She says this when he is gone. She can almost see him stalking off into some faraway maze of tall, gangly grass. She blinks as the sun sinks down below the hills, and even his shadow is gone.

A bird cries out in the still spring air, beating its wings as it lifts itself slowly from the darkening ground and toward the bright, sun-shimmering sky.