Across the black sky there shot two luminous
shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the
chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly
beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned.
The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like
celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each
shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines,
like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly
wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender
shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the
old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl
watched it in silence until the last pale glimmer faded and
was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down
the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky.
They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the
other.
"Curtain," said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite
the sand. Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp
in parental arms; with lunch baskets exuding the sickly
scent of bananas; with disheveled vandals whose moist palms
grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers.
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