“Did you want to walk?”
He nods, looking eager for the first time. Yes, in the moonlight, he can pass for mortal.
“I’ll set the next batch,” and that’s a matter of a few minutes, and then she closes the drawers, gathers her things—which are scant, a small pouch on a belt, with her keys and some other things in it, much as a purse was in my day—and they walk out, through the slices of moonlight bisected by window-frames, lying parallel on the dark tile.
Parallels. I feel a need tonight for the music of Gauss, once I settle the matter of lunch. Or perhaps Saccheri’s Euclid Vindicated. There’s a certain drama in a reductio ad absurdum on that which turns out to be the full range of possibilities.
***
Excerpt from my work-in-progress in response to the Vampire Variations challenge. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.
Notes: Saccheri (18th century) and Gauss (18th-19th century) wrote on non-Euclidean geometry, with their respective works produced almost exactly a hundred years apart. Saccheri’s Euclid Vindicated attempts to prove Euclid’s parallel postulate by assuming its negation and proceeding to a contradiction, which resulted in the production of many of the theorems of elliptic and hyperbolic geometry.
E. P. Beaumont 
I’m sorry EP but someone has drummed POV into me and I’m having a hard time with this. It’s in present tense? In the second paragraph I gather it is she speaking but “in my day” changes the pov again. I see you wish to convey a picture, emotion and you do
FYI, I’m not seeing the POV or tense issue if it’s in 1st person, present tense, and the “in my day” is indicative of a past status she’s currently recalling. There’s at least three people in this scene, right? The narrator, and then a man and a woman if I’m reading it correctly. If that’s the case, it’s correct as it stands.
Love the dreamy sense of the prose, by the way. Great job. 🙂
I suspect the POV problem comes from the shortness of the snippet, though I also took a while to figure out there was a third person–the narrator.
Interesting, flew a bit above my head but I was deliciously taken by the use of words…an unusual snippet today!
Thanks to all commenters for the notes on tense, as well as the recondite interests of the narrator. Every story I write is a new and different Trip, but this one seems to be a trippier Trip than average, both for me and for the readers.