around the table enthusiastically playing some game. The player in the
center was dealing cards from a deck. At the end of the deal, the dealer
suddenly gave
him
the last card and cried out. He took the card
involuntarily and looked at it; it was not a card at all, but a letter. The
letter had a strange, soft feel to it. When he exerted pressure with his
fingers, blood came spurting up. He screamed out and awoke.
His vision was obscured by a dingy, mistlike film. There was a crackling
noise of dry paper as he moved his body. His face was covered with an
open newspaper. Damn! He had fallen asleep again. A film of sand fell
from the surface of the paper when he brushed it aside. From the
quantity of sand it would seem that quite some time had gone by. The
slant of the sun's rays piercing through the cracks in the wall told him it
was about noon. But what was that smell? he wondered. New ink?
Impossible, he thought, yet he glanced at the date line. Wednesday, the
sixteenth. It really was today's paper! It was unbelievable, but it was
true. Then the woman must have passed along his request.
He propped himself up with an elbow on the mattress, which had
become sodden and sticky with perspiration. All kinds of thoughts at
once began to whirl around in his mind, and he tried in vain to follow
the print on the long-awaited paper.
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