The commander ordered to fix the mechanical failure when Yuri was about to open the porthole. Once the cosmonaut had quickly checked the instruments, he took a few deep breaths, and made sure that everything was functional. After a solid push, he threw himself into the inchoate interstellar medium. The big beacons, set lengthwise on the spacecraft, emanated a solid light which had diminished the cold atmosphere of the surrounding emptiness, producing echoes of unheard sounds. That was his fifth mission, and hardly would he have had another. At the age of fifty-one he did not consider himself an old man, and the glory he earned assured him a future in the Agency...
(by The Cosmonaut, Nignt Tales)

Claire had laid her head at the first strokes of midnight. The big biedermeier clock had suffocated the silence with vibrant echoes, now fading with difficulty. The dark, broken by the mild whisper of an abatjour, had filled the woman with gloomy unhappiness. It was not the first time. Even if more than two years had passed, she still felt Arthur's death as heavy as a stone that, though made lighter by time, continued to roll in her thoughts. More that ever, the river of memories flooded her mind, and filled it with a solid, suffocating melancholy that grew stronger at the end of the day... (by The last waltz, Night Tales)

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