Last night I woke suddenly, as if ejected from sleep. I couldn’t see the clock over the vague hump of your blanketed shoulder, but it was the deepest ditch of the night.

A cry had waked me – I was almost certain. I had turned my head even as I opened my eyes, looking toward you, to see what was wrong. What would make you cry out like that. But it wasn’t you. You breathed under my gaze, steady, unaware.

I stayed up on my elbows, listening hard to the night, but there were only the sounds of a sleeping house: the quiet tick of the refrigerator, the slow contraction of the wooden door frames, the secret movement of the air. Sounds of the night watch.

I listened for sounds in the street, but there was nothing – no woman calling for help (and I had been sure the cry was female), not even a cat communing with the moon.

It was only when I laid my head back down and gravity loosened the tears at the corners of my eyes and pulled them across my temples that I remembered the dream, and that the cry had come from me.