It doesn't take long for a bleak, yawning silence to assert itself through the tinkle of ice in highball glasses and the percolating dance tunes.
Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynne left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.
But it eventually carried on, and the audience responded to its bleak finale with silence and then a standing ovation.
On Friday, visitors hoping to take the famously short, rumbling, 33-degree ride from Hill Street up to Olive Street were greeted instead with still silence, a bleak reminder that Angels Flight is an enigmatic icon, beloved and bedeviled all at once.
Saeed was grateful for Nadia's presence, for the way in which she altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words but making them less bleak in their muteness.
"There's no one so tough the Man can't beat him down," Tomlinson said, and the bleak authority in his voice silenced the room.
