It is the nature and the pleasure of townspeople to distrust the night. Lisbon nights are cold, in spite of what they say about them. She was dying of heat in a t-shirt all day and chose not to believe those who had warned her. She was no townsman.

And there she was, standing on a bridge at 2 a.m., freezing to death, watching the ships pass underneath her. She watched a ship disappear under the bridge, counted to three, then ran to the other side, watching the ship show up again. She was convinced that over those three seconds a ship was invisible to her, it changed, and she tried to guess those changes. She became fairly good at it.

Sometimes the boatman came out of his cabin to check the lighting, other times she could see a box or two, fall down from a pile on a cargo ship. Sometimes she saw how in went a regular ship, yet out came a ship from Remarque’s novels, all impatient to hit the coast of the salvatory land.

She waited for another ship tugging a Band-Aid patch, which never left her ring finger. She waited but it seemed like the sea had run out of ships for her. She ran to the other side of the bridge and bent over, trying to see if any ships had stuck there. Nothing. Impatiently she turned on her heels and walked away.

She wandered around until morning, when it started raining, she went into a bakery to have breakfast. She returned to the bridge, puddles reflected the blue sky, her t-shirt trembled in the wind, tickling her back. She stopped, stood straight and kept tugging her Band-Aid patch.
A little boy was still playing with paper ships in a big puddle of sky.

м?