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The analyst holds his notepad. He has been seeing Alba for two years; the sessions move slowly, and Alba is often silent. The analyst leans closer. Alba sighs. The analyst asks what Alba feels, and her shoulders flinch, and she buries her face in the couch. The office is shadowed; the lights dim. They work in a cave, away from the world. Outside the analyst's window, the sun slips its bonfires behind winter trees.
“What are you feeling?”
Alba says nothing.
“You seem preoccupied.”
Alba says nothing.
The analyst falls into a dark reverie. Outside the sky becomes amethyst and night beckons—what comes of this work but darkness, the analyst muses. Images flow over his eyes like water. He dreams that his swivel chair is a time machine, forward, backward; he rocks and imagines another cave, this time Lascaux, the animals, brother and sister creatures arrayed from the hunts of past epochs. His hand detaches from his mind and he scribbles on his notepad, tracing the scorn of Alba's cheek, her exquisite sneer, her half-shuttered gaze. He hunts the monsters in her mind. Before words are drawings, before drawings are feelings—senses.
Alba rises from the couch, pointing. “What are you writing?”
“Nothing really,” the analyst says.
“You used your pen.” Alba's eyes are sharp obsidian. “You weren't paying attention.”
“You didn't say anything.”