íhald

It is a familiar double silhouette, one figure cradling another at the side of a darkened street after the bars close. She faces away from the passers-by, towards a shopfront. He holds her by the shoulders gently, firmly, as if she were a heavy bottle of wine upended and shaking with every gulp of air choking past the liquid splashing out. Another liquid is forcing its way out of her body.

Such couples are a common enough sight on the nocturnal, bar-lined streets of Northern cities, though this is not one. There, it is often as not the ignominious beginning of a beautiful romance. You may well wrinkle your nose as you pass them, sure of your rootedness in another, more tasteful romantic culture and accordingly of your own immunity to such public humiliations.

Maybe you are already a few steps past them when another sound makes its way to you, and you realize that you have misread the scene: It is not a beginning at all but an end.