Last Night in Montreal

She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both.

But no one, Zed had scrawled once in a letter from Africa several years ago, should have to die without a witness

the languages he knew were dead or on life support.

The shred of privacy afforded by having a secret somehow seemed about as close as she’d ever come to having her own room.

“I dream in Chamicuro,” the last fluent speaker of her language told a reporter from the New York Times, in her thatched-hut village in the Peruvian jungle in the final year of the twentieth century, “but I cannot tell my dreamsto anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being the last one.”

He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking.