A man is lying on a bed in a small room in the dark. Weary and afraid, he prays for courage to sleep, to wake and work again; he doubts that waking when he wakes will recompense his sleep. His prayers lean upward on the dark and fall like flares from a catastrophe. He is a man breathing the fear of hopeless prayer, prayed in hope. He breathes the prayer of his fear that gives a light by which he sees only himself lying in the dark, a low mound asking almost nothing at all. And then, long yet before dawn, comes what he had not thought: love that causes him to stir like the dead in the grave,
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