The Silk Room

Two windows: one open, one closed.
A pile of silk. When it fell to the floor, it still had the creases and folds that it had possessed when she was wearing it. Her body was now without crease or fold, as if she had transferred her age to the dress.
She walked towards him. Static from the nylon carpet crackled beneath her feet.
For ever, the bare feet lowering the nap on a blue hotel carpet, amongst the solidified red wine stains, moving towards him, for ever, moving towards him, for ever, moving towards him.
Later, the deed accomplished, with him still in his drowsiness, she walked into the bathroom. Each change in pitch of her singing in the shadow of the shower changed the colour of the light in the room across the spectrum from red to indigo. A train vibrated past, level with the closed window, and shook things free.
For ever, things being shook free, shook free for ever.
He stood. Caught his foot in something, something shaken free and rubbery that first yielded to and then rebuffed his step. He shook it away and moved towards the dressing table. A single giant sunflower head. Wedged in a wine bottle. Dry-bleeding sulphur-yellow pollen onto the polished surface. He traced his finger through the fallen powder. The letter S. Like a river, bending to East and West.
The bathroom door opened. She moved on past him, dust-dry from the shower, bone and only bone, moved through his outstretched leg, moved on through the bed and dematerialised through the closed window, a skeleton with no skin and no internal organs.
For ever, leaving with nothing, leaving with nothing for ever.
He lay on the bed. He couldn’t keep still. His limbs moved as if by someone else’s volition. He felt he was being danced; danced by the spirit she had left behind. Outside, he could hear the steam gushing upwards through the noise of the street like branches of noise, branches of noise reducing and evaporating into hissing twigs, hissing twigs of whispered steam, dying through the frosted air. The wind shifted in and dispersed the sunflower pollen. Swept it to West and East.
For ever, the wind shifting in and straightening things shaken free.
A sparrow flew in through the open window. Excised seeds from the mulchy centre of the sunflower. Flew out again with a single seed in its beak, leaving its scatterings on the floor.
He slept. In the drowsy straitjacket of his dreams, her voice encircled him like the assassin-twist/whisper of a cold knife: “We are in a war; in a war, things happen.”
He awoke; he decided to take a shower. Surrounding the cubicle, her discarded skin, lampshade-thin, curtained-off the old steam, curtained off the lingered traces of her perfume. Through the bathroom door, he heard the mirror fall from the ceiling and bounce, intact, on the bed. When he came out, the outline of her body was scraped in chalk on its back surface. He lay down on the mirror, within the chalk lines. He stayed where he was: he did not melt through to another world. Rather, the cold from the dark side of the mirror melted into him, froze him to an immobility, stuck him to the dull side of the silver, unable to turn and look but feeling her body vibrating back through him, humming backwards across the room, re-gathering and reclaiming her discarded internal organs as she did so, then back into her skin, back into her silk dress, back through the door as if she had never existed.
For ever, the smell of her skin washed free of the last one, washed clear for the next one, a series of scented purges lasting for ever.They found him dead, of course: naked in the moonlight spilled through the open window. Stuck to a fallen mirror. His body curved like the letter S. Covered in pecking sparrows. Smiling.