The girl sat in the empty church, gazing unseeingly up the deserted isle, from her seat midway back on the isle.
Her surroundings were white, shiny stone, and some light wood, maybe maple.
She sat very still, not glancing around her at the almost deserted church, not even letting her eye lid twitch or her temple throb.
Far away, the eerie sweet music was fading away, as was the outside world.
There, in front of her, at the very end of the isle, was a raised platform, on which lay the black coffin.
Shiny and new, it glinted dully in the churche's incandescent light, the muted reflections of white fingers playing over and over again on the chissled corner of the lid.
And her gaze was irrevocably drawn past the reflection, to the fingers themselves, just breaking the black that was the coffin, barely poking out of the black sleeve which belonged to a black tuxedo, worn by the figure kneeling by the coffin.
She could not see his face, only his figure, and his jet black hair, falling to his shoulders in thick ripples, the ends turned up, almost as if he had been zapped by a great and angry static shock.
His head was bowed, one hand out of sight, the other doing that tapping of dry hopeless things against the cold of the coffin's wood.
The fingers were long, and in contrast with the deadness of the coffin, seemed whiter than the white tile floor of the platform.
The girl forgot the church, and her dress, forgot how long she had been saving for it and finally having the opportunity to wear it, had, up to this moment, been extra cautious not to smudge or rip it.
She jumped out of her careful perch on the pew, and threw herself up the isle.
That figure bowed in grief, those beautiful fingers, that perfectly fitting black suit, they filled her with pitty- unbearable sadness, they made her long to give her life away to make that still, solitary figure happy again.
She slowed down a few feet away from the figure, and cautiously, tentatively reached out her hand, to brush his shoulder..
But she never got a chance, because just before she touched him, he turned around, and she saw his eyes.