The day after the gallery visit, I awoke with a lingering headache, alarmed by the sound of the phone. At first I confused the sound of the phone with the sound of swallows. Those birds are capable of making a terrible noise when they get together. In the summertime they glide through the narrow Florentine alleys in communal roosts, and burst into the air space above the city piazzas, evicting the elderly, terrorizing them with their macabre noise, and causing the poor old souls to break their habit of sitting on the benches to stare ahead blankly for the remainder of the evening, as if into a void. I imagined the elderly leaving the piazzas in pairs; in the transitory space between sleep and wakefulness, I saw them throwing the weight of their weaker halves into their canes, filing out into the distance two by two. When I finally emerged from the slumber of sleep, the sharp stabbing headache drawing me out into the light of day, I identified the sound: it was the phone ringing, sending its dreadful vibrations through the wall…
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