“Have you ever noticed,” murmured Lydia, her fingers tracing an invisible pattern on the coffee-stained tablecloth, “a sense of foreboding when something is too quiet? Like that empty spot, Robert.”
Her eyes flickered toward the corner, where a 空旷的cat bed lay, untouched by feline warmth and life, both an absence and an omen.
“Lydia, it’s just a bed,” Robert quipped, barely looking up from the old newspaper he pretended to read. “Paws chose a new throne, probably.”
“Not everything can be dismissed with your nonchalance,” Lydia retorted, a brittle edge in her voice that suggested a kind of silent rebellion. In that vacant cat bed, she supposed, were the ghosts of words unspoken, actions undone.
Robert exhaled, the pages rustling like autumn leaves, a mundane storm amidst the sea of their shared silence. The air was thick with what he hadn’t said, what he couldn’t say, satellites burning in their respective orbits around a truth too stubborn to express.
Suddenly, his thoughts, like Joyce’s own dizzying prose, began to flow—chaotic, circular. He half-smiled, a mere twitch of lip playacting sincerity. “You make life into a mystery, Lydia. Sometimes a bed—”
“It isn’t about the bed, Robert,” she interrupted, her gaze fixing him like a pin agitating through still water. “Paws is just the latest in a line of disappearances, isn’t it?”
He paused, feigned calm, unfolding one day’s memories into another’s tapestry. He heard the echo of her pain, saw the specter of her concerns. She was right, though he fought the admission.
“Lydia, what do you think I did?” His voice was low, steady, rehearsed.
“Did, did… such a past-tense proposition,” she replied, her sentences curling like smoke through the room. “Perhaps it’s a doing, Robert. Constant and present.”
Their dance continued, a parody of intimacy. The vacant cat bed, a strange sentinel, spectated their theatre of whispers. Her eyes sought his, probing, exploring the interlocked corridors of thought she believed held the answers.
“In this case,” she ventured with a whisper, “isn’t it fitting, nearly poetic, for things undone to find their closure?”
He was the mirror he avoided, his reflection no longer docile or dim. “Closure? Think karma has a committee now?” This laugh was realer, not so much ironic as it was desperate.
“Listen.” Her voice softened, as if a hymn. “Just remember that karma’s deliverance is often overdue, but inevitable.” It sounded like prophecy or prayer, Robert couldn’t tell which.
And there it was, the symphony of silence descending upon them, threading through old anxieties. The air pulsed, heavy with the expectancy of storm clouds gathering, of unseen forces aligning.
Outside, the rain began its relentless percussion, each drop a prelude to something unnamed but immovable. Robert’s eyes lost themselves in the distance, beyond the window’s framing, where the world recoiled from the first tremors of the coming rain.
“Do you really think things could be… undone?” he whispered, a wisp of smoke curling from the confines of his chest.
As Lydia turned away, toward that 空旷的cat bed, a shadow passed over her face—a resignation come too soon or too late. She offered no answer, for in that question lay both revelation and reckoning.
Robert was left to ponder, enveloped in the shimmer of enigmatic self-awareness. Had the universe’s arbitrary threads found their weaving in his actions? Or had a simple, empty cat bed become the symbol of things fated to be addressed, their mutual lives held hostage to the whisper of chance left unheeded for too long?
Neither knowing nor needing to know, they moved through their conjoined cosmos, leaving the vacant bed as both talisman and warning.