Sunday, August 23, 2015

Ululate

ululate
verb, intransitive. Howl or wail as an expression of strong emotion, typically grief. From the Latin ululat-, meaning howled or shrieked.

The sounds awakened Dan for the third night in a row before he pulled on some clothes and went to investigate.

They were more faint in the hallway; louder in the stairwell. He descended two stories before he realized that the volume was fading. He turned and went up, then: two, three, then four and five floors. On the last landing, he looked up at a rectangle of night sky framed by the open door to the roof.

Cautiously, he tiptoed up the last flight of stairs. It was silent now, except for the whisper of traffic far below. Who was up here on the roof at this hour, Dan wondered? Was he about to see something he would rather not see, or interrupt something better left alone?

He paused in the doorway and peered out. A young woman stood a few yards away, her back to him. She wore ordinary, at-home clothes: jeans and a sweatshirt against the chill air. Her blond hair stood out in the gloom, piled any old way on her head, secured by a plastic clip. He recognized her by that mane--silvery in the dim light: she lived on the fourth floor, in one of the corner apartments. He vaguely recalled hearing the building super say that she sang in the chorus of an opera company.

She ululated a few notes, paused, then launched into a full-blown aria, a capella, her voice carrying into the night across the dark roofs. She was practicing. Maybe she had a chance at a bigger role than one of the voices in the chorus, and planned to make the most of it. Dan was not an opera fan, but the timbre of her voice snagged and held his attention as few voices he had ever heard. She wasn't a soprano--not a first soprano, anyway. Her voice was lower than that, richer. He didn't want her to stop singing. It didn't matter that he couldn't understand the language of the piece. He assumed it was Italian. As he felt whenever he heard Stevie Nicks sing, all that mattered was her voice

Careful not to make a sound, he sank to the floor of the top landing so he could listen until she finished.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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