In certain slumber she still spoke. Her mouth was pink with lipstick. My hand was stung with bug bites from our walks in the garden, our long discussions distracting me though the itch is continuous and inevitable. She mumbled, flipped, disappeared into a network of cotton. I reached one hand, ripe with bumps, to touch in between her shoulder blades. She trembled, or so it seemed, beneath my fingertips.
This probably doesn’t exist anymore, as it never has, as it never will. There is no desire to touch her, nor do I observe her in her sleep. I am lying sideways. She is half asleep, half awake. We are together with a ravine of white between us. She is happy enough. There is the smell of wet wood in the house.
Today she came home from work still sipping stale coffee.
“I’m tired,” she began, but I was reading from a paper someone had handed to me on the street. An artists collage was being exhibited. She was still speaking when I looked up.
“Do you want to cook tonight, or should I?”
I pointed to the flyer, to which she nodded, as if to say “Yes, that, whatever it is, is our plan,” if only to confirm we will have a plan. As if to say, the plan is all we need, though the details don’t matter.
She slunk past me into the shadows of the hallway. I hadn’t turned the lights on, not yet, though the leafy green of outside had coated our walls, had rendered their whiteness slippery and dark.
My hands itch. Her mouth is not pink. The cicadas are singing, the cockroaches whistle, there is a storm coming they’ve said, a tropic storm. It could be a hurricane, if it tries hard enough.