Until Morning

a novel · sample excerpt · Chapter One — The Rounds

Before Light

The kettle hadn't been filled.

Theo stood at the counter with the empty carafe in his hand and could not have said for how long. The window over the sink held nothing — no rain, no light yet, only his own shape going gray in the glass and, past it, the street doing the thing it did now, which was nothing. No cars warming. No feet on the walk. Weeks ago the world had stopped coming to the door, and somewhere in there he had stopped listening for it.

He filled the kettle and set it on. The small blue crown of flame was the brightest thing in the house.

Moss was in the doorway.

He hadn't heard him come — Moss moved through the rooms like weather now, arriving already there. He sat just off the tile, where the hardwood ended, and watched. Not the cupboard where his bowl lived. Not the back door. Theo. Ears up, tail still. A body's length back, the way he kept himself these days: close enough to keep watch, far enough not to be touched.

"Moss," Theo said. "You've been out. I let you out. You remember that."

Moss didn't move.

Theo crouched and put out a hand, and Moss leaned his head into it a moment, warm, and then drew back and went on watching him, as though Theo were a door that might do something. Theo straightened. His lower back told him he'd slept wrong, or not enough — the same complaint every morning. He'd stopped answering that too.

A Week, Maybe Two

The bag was still in the spare room.

He passed it on his way to the linen shelf and it stopped him the way it always did: a soft canvas thing slumped against the wall, mouth unzipped a few inches and never any further. Gus had come with it back in the spring. A week, Theo had said into the phone, in the days when there were still calls to take. A week, maybe two, till this blows over and he can get back to his own place. He'd said it with his palm flat on Gus's shoulder, the pair of them laughing at the size of the words blow over.

The words had worn out. The bag stayed. Somewhere the two weeks had quietly become a thing no one counted, the way you stop counting the days of a long rain.

It was good, having him here. Theo held to that, because it was true — the house sat easier with Gus in it, some knot in Theo's own chest going slack when the old man's laugh came down the stairs. He held to that and did not turn over the thing underneath it, which was that nobody had chosen this and it had closed over them anyway, gently, while they were looking at something else.