The whole bar was silent, every corner, every face, every drink stopped before it reached the mouth, for eight minutes long, as the electric guitar sped out its peak and drums beat rapidly behind, the blues jumping boundless, echoing through the stage that reflected the white suit of this musical magician. Anabel had never seen anything like this. Sleight of strings, fingers that flew at the speed of the dizzying sounds created.

Her heart out of her chest, tears in her eyes, it took her a little longer than the rest of the crowd to break into applause.

Cheeks hurt so much once she stopped smiling. She couldn't remember ever feeling that way about a song before. And never had silence like that, born around the music, ever been witnessed or heard by her ears. A silence that spoke of suspense, of something indescribable, like a sharp perfection, the sting of hope over all.

Such was a West End bar on a Saturday night, long after many of the other dives and haunts had closed. And she would never forget it.

In a stardusted heartbeat she pulled herself from sleepless sheets and arched her back, her chin falling as she fluttered wide her eyes and got from her bed, and walked towards the closet, swinging it open. There hung her few dresses and below them rested old boots, one pair leather one pair snakeskin. Beside the dresses a dusty leather coat. She stared into the blackness and it melted and crinkled until she was staring instinctually past what was there and beyond. A swirling abyss of shimmering particles that resembled in all their glare a spiral galaxy. Turning and turning, forever.

"Forever", she whispered, and held her hands to her chest, staring at this warping oddity that was through the doors of her closet.

The light grew. It intensified the silhouettes that danced within like cloudy patterns from a smoker in a dark room's exhale. Ebon tangles blew forward across cheeks of milky pale and that solar breeze rippled the hem of a thin little nightrail.

Surprised and starcrossed, sapphire eyes turned over to the empty bed and she covered her mouth. A pile of funeral bouquets, twisted and dried, lay where her lover should sleep. Faded old ribbon still twined about their browned stems, and that smell of unrequitedness, of goodbyes filled the room.

Stepping for the bed she picked one up and held it to her nose. It was a rose. The colour of time stained burgundy. Her heart was filled with a strange tenderness, and in that breathless moment, she turned back to the closet, to that miraculous vision, and a sigh fell from her as blackness flashed and all of that hypnotica was gone.