Joe stopped halfway across the bridge to watch the full moon hover loose over the city, half-expecting it to fall and shatter, littering the Boston streets with brittle yellow-gray slivers that glowed dully under the streetlights. There was a halo to it, and the air was wet, threatening snow. Joe shuddered once, hard, as the wind blew in off the Charles, through his windbreaker and the threadbare sweater underneath; try as he might, he was never dressed appropriately these days. The waning New England fall hadn't let him get it right once yet. Frowning, he took hold of his jacket and sweater and began to shake them, trying to dislodge whatever it was that was scratching down his front. Probably a crumb, he thought dismissively.

He'd gone to Harvard Square for supper in a basement pub. "Supper" had only amounted to a beer and a plate of garlic bread at a tiny table under an equally tiny window while he watched the patrons at other tables. One couple in particular caught his attention, a small, fierce-looking woman and the shaggy, gray-maned man beside her, who was tucking into his meal with single-minded concentration. They were set apart like he was, their little table tucked into a corner nook that gave them some semblance of privacy, like a dark, cozy den. The woman was talking animatedly, stopping occasionally to brush her stiff black hair out of her eyes, which, Joe noticed as he eyed the pair over the rim of his stein, were a clear, yellowish hue of green. She opened her mouth wide as she spoke and her teeth were small, the canines particularly sharp. She wasn't eating anything but Joe imagined that if she were she'd tear at her food with precise, vicious bites, soft growls rumbling deep in the cavity of her chest.

Joe had stared so long at her that her companion had taken notice, and when Joe realized that he was being watched in turn, the man's eyebrows raised high more with bemusement, really, than outright annoyance, he reddened and lowered his eyes back down to the dry crumbs on his plate.

The couple had left not long afterward. Joe only raised his eyes again when he was certain they were facing away from him, the man's broad back in a fading red jacket a brick wall keeping the woman from Joe's view. He could hear her laughter, high and jubilant, as they disappeared out into the vestibule and then up the stairs and out of sight. He felt suddenly bereft.

Joe lingered over the last half of his beer even though it had already gotten warmer than he preferred and gone flat. A dull, inexplicable pain he couldn't put a name to settled heavily in his chest.

After he left the pub, he stopped at a bench to tie the laces of one of his sneakers and decide where to go next, if anywhere. No destination immediately presented itself but he wasn't against long walks and he knew his way around the city well enough to ramble as much as he chose.

Thrusting his hands into the smallish pockets of his jeans he winced when the sharp edge of a crumpled envelope stuck into the side of his right pinky. He wriggled the hand around until it was no longer being stabbed and rubbed it against the soft cotton lining until the pain eased.

He'd heard from both of his sisters earlier in the afternoon, the older calling and the younger, who'd developed an infatuation with whatever she perceived to be "adorably old-fashioned," writing. It was her letter jammed in his pocket. When the windows of his dingy South End apartment had begun icing over in the mornings he'd used the word "hoarfrost" on a whim when he wrote about it to Gina. In her reply she'd stated that it was officially "her favorite word of all-time" but that there weren't many opportunities for using it. The one instance she had had ended in a misunderstanding that she was trying, and failing, not to find too funny.

Sarah, the older, worked in finance. Joe could never remember the specifics of her job because extensive talk about money made him a little uneasy. She teased him sometimes, chanting the word tunefully in his ear as if she were a chorus girl from Cabaret, and then dialing him right back after he hung up on her. She fussed and henpecked, but she was always so good-natured that Joe couldn't find it in himself to resent her, no matter how often their parents compared them to remind him exactly how he came up short.

They probably meant well; most parents supposedly did. But whatever their intentions, every tactic they used to try and light a fire under his ass only ever served to send him headlong in what in their eyes was the wrong direction. Art was aimless and unpredictable, they warned him, hardly a stable career goal. They couldn't support him in such a choice, they'd declared, and waited for him to recant, sure that he wouldn't venture out onto the rope after his safety net had been yanked away. Too proud to register their surprise and dismay when he didn't, they tightly assured him that they weren't disowning him, merely shoving him out of the nest with a bit more force than was typical.

His life had been one long battle to push the square peg in the round hole. He loved his sisters and respected his parents but he didn't fit properly with them. "An anomaly," Sarah affectionately called him.

A car horn behind him on the busy road brought him out of his reverie and back to the present. The lights of an airplane blinked reproachfully at him until they were absorbed by a cloud. Another harsh breeze blasted through his clothes and urged him to start walking again.

Turning to be on his way, he nearly bumped into a woman jogging by. She was in Harvard gray and maroon and her sandy brown ponytail streamed almost straight behind her. She took quick, sure strides, her long legs making it look like she hardly needed to exert any effort at all. Her skin glowed with a thin sheen of perspiration even under only the anemic streetlights and the hazy illumination from the moon. His gaze followed her until she left his peripheral and he'd been about to spin on his heel to keep watching her but he thought better of it and continued forward, eyes lowered and squinting against the wind. When he stepped of the bridge, he looked up again to find himself surrounded by other runners, all women and most wearing maroon and gray. He plated his feet and kept still, letting the pack swarm around and past him, chuckling when several cheerful voices called out "'Scuse us!" between pants. As the group was beginning to thin out, he heard the low buzz of conversation, two voices murmuring back and forth.

"Wonder how far ahead the bitch is now," wondered one, with a caustic loftiness.

"Imagines herself quite the fucking alpha-female," sneered another in reply.

Joe couldn't see exactly which of the runners the sniping belonged to, and he didn't really care to know. It was just a variation on familiar themes, anyway.

Sighing with disheartened relief when the last of the pack's footsteps faded out of his earshot, he aimed his steps directly for the nearest T stop.

Down the orange-tiled corridor, as he was switching from Red Line to Orange, he could hear the plaintive wail of a busker's violin. Violins weren't common, at least not on the subway. Saxophones and guitars were the usual fare, all played with the bare minimum of talent required to make the music tolerable if not memorable.

He didn't recognize the song. He mentally sifted through his mother's stacks of classical records for a familiar measure but nothing presented itself. It was strong but mournful, and when Joe closed his eyes he could hear voices in it, crying to one another across a distance.

The man playing was thin, almost spindly, and wearing a gauzy shirt completely inappropriate for the weather. His skin was leathery and creased and a shade of sun-baked brown that can only be achieved by shunning the indoors as much as possible. He played as though in pain, thrashing and straining, the arch of his back sharp and unnatural. The loose, frenetic movements of his limbs were like rough jerks on the strings of a marionette by an overzealous toddler. There was something distinctly canine about the man's eyes, wide and generously lashed as they were, and they gave off the impression of boundless, unconditional forgiveness. They stared unseeingly, focusing only fleetingly on randomly chosen objects as he swayed with his music. Joe's steps halted a close but respectable distance away. He was half-afraid the men would shake himself apart or slam his elbow on the wall as his arm drew violently back on a long, harsh note. Joe's spine stiffened as though trying to evade an icy trickle, and then relaxed, the violin apologizing for its outburst with a gentle, placating lullaby.

Joe was aware of other people going past, sometimes blocking his view, and the precise click of businessmen's shoes or the wet squeak of commuters' sneakers, a sardonic mumble of "Get a job" or something similar. His cheeks grew warm under the chill that still colored them. He felt like all these people walking by were eavesdropping on a private conversation, something deeply personal that loses all its import and becomes almost shameful when intruded upon. But this conversation was entirely one-sided; he'd brought nothing to it. He was only the listener, and if it hadn't been him it would've been someone, anyone else.

Well, I am the one here right now, anyway, he told himself. Counts for something.

The song had changed again, he noticed abruptly when he came back out of himself, and any mind for the crowd still rushing by was cut off.

It was hurried, the music, kind of like a march, and it insisted that Joe go with it, let it push him onward. Joe started picturing himself running, his feet pounding grass, pavement, through snow and the shallow water of rocky streams. As the vision continued, he was joined, first by the woman from the bridge, silently keeping pace alongside him, her shoulders thrown back and her eyes focused strictly in front of her, always looking ahead, then the couple from the pub. They sometimes hung back only to bound forward again, laughing and frolicking and resembling a pair of lovesick puppies, the woman's small, fierce teeth showing in her smile while the man's thick, rough hair flew around his face like a swarm of ragged gray moths. The violinist was among them but always out of Joe's sight, although he could sometimes see the tip of the bow as though it were floating in the air and being stroked across the strings by the wind.

None of them acknowledged each other in Joe's vision, no eye-contact was made, no speaking. There was a restful camaraderie between them all that didn't require it, flourished all the better without it, in fact. Understanding without need of explanation. It was so simple, Joe mused. Too simple, too easy to be anything but a product of his daydream. The thought made his heart sink with childlike disappointment.

He scattered the delusion with a swift blink and glanced one last time at the busker before merging into another wave of people and riding it to the platform.

He'd waited for 10 minutes and still a train hadn't shown up. The city seemed to shut down earlier and earlier each night, and the subway lagged, shuffling sleepily from station to station like the last child left awake roaming through the house in footie pajamas and begging for glass after glass of water. Joe was used to it, but it didn't frustrate him any less. He could still hear the strains of the violin, faint and tinny now, from the corridor. That ache of longing throbbed in his chest again, abstract and objectless.

A breeze blew through the station, warm and cool by turns, signaling the arrival of a train, but it was going in the opposite direction. Joe stuck his hands back into his pockets, the wind sucking at his jacket and the loose legs of his jeans. His ears uselessly attempted to pick up the sounds of the violin through all the rumbling and screeching and then the flat, watery, dying-mermaid tone that sounded just before the train's doors slid open and then again when they shut. But even when the din subsided and the station echoed hollowly as the train receded he found he still couldn't hear the music. He knit his heavy brows and slowly released in a thin ghostly stream the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

A mild, lonely panic welled up in his throat that no amount of swallowing could relieve. He felt a little manic, the sudden need to be moving, and his feet went with it, taking him back the way he'd just come but at a quicker pace. He expected, hoped, to see the violinist still there, chatting with a passerby, or pausing to drink from a bottle of water, or even packing to go as long as he hadn't left yet. But the corridor was empty, not even offering any evidence that the man and his violin had been there at all.

Joe's feet moved even faster until he was all but running, his backpack swaying awkwardly from side to side and chafing at his shoulder blades. He heard a pop as the broken catch on the plastic case he kept his drawing pencils in lost its precarious hold and the contents of the case spilled out to rattle around among the books, their carefully sharpened points dulling or breaking off completely. He didn't pay any mind to it. He hurtled himself up an escalator, his calves aching as he took two steps at a time. He had to slow up when he reached the top, to catch his breath and look in the directions of both exits. He didn't see anyone, and neither of the doors was vibrating on its hinges from recent movement. Without hesitation, he went out the door closest to him. A cold blast socked him in the face and stole his breath from his lungs, plucking it right out like a pickpocket. A dusting of snow had glazed the pavement a grayish white and flakes were still drifting casually down. Joe couldn't see a soul, not even a distant silhouette as he turned in a slow, hopeful circle. His muscles relaxed with resignation and his shoulders drooped.

He looked down at his feet. Under his right foot there was a footprint perpendicular to his own, and then another leading away from it, followed by another... Further down the line he noticed paw-prints, large but strangely delicate, crossing through and mingling with the footprints before breaking free in the direction of the park. A frigid wind was building, just strong enough to scatter the powdery snow in all directions, causing the imprints to blend together before disappearing completely.