(no subject)
i don't normally post my writing here, but this is short and a dead-end and i suppose i just felt like offering it up. i don't think i like it. i don't feel it has much zest.
I was there when she died. The room was a hot box, a tiny cubicle filled with everyone else’s breath and the scraping of heels every few seconds as people made their way past her body. They’d peer at her, their noses close enough to touch her sometimes, and they’d quietly wait for a personal goodbye, the flick of a finger or the tiny twist of her smile. She was on her left side at first, her cheek resting on the corner of the bed, but a man rolled her easily onto her back and she bent her neck as if to look up at the ceiling. She lay like that awhile in her ruby bathrobe and a streaming sea of white gold beaming down from the open windows, one leg glowing and exposed and the other hidden beneath, but no one thought to cover her with a blanket because everything felt so warm already. A girl stood just above the headboard and watched her face curiously until a tightly-pinned curl released and fell against her neck. The girl smiled and stepped away. By the end of the day, the guests had opened her wine for themselves and were moving her like a marionette to a record they‘d found in a box of her things. They’d discovered that bringing her baby boy near to her caused her to sigh and heave about uneasily, but more to their amusement, if you held a drink above her and threatened to spill it on her robe, she’d kick you. The women laughed and danced with each other in the far corner of the room and I huddled with a group outside in the freezing rain to have a cigarette. “She didn’t let nobody smoke in her house!” a man said to me, and it was true, but she didn’t really like to have us smoking on the lawn either. A few of us finally drew the curtains; it was nearly midnight and the wine was gone, the food eaten, and she had turned to her right side and flung a palm out dismissively. We closed up all the doors around the time it began to snow, but we left the record player on.
I was there when she died. The room was a hot box, a tiny cubicle filled with everyone else’s breath and the scraping of heels every few seconds as people made their way past her body. They’d peer at her, their noses close enough to touch her sometimes, and they’d quietly wait for a personal goodbye, the flick of a finger or the tiny twist of her smile. She was on her left side at first, her cheek resting on the corner of the bed, but a man rolled her easily onto her back and she bent her neck as if to look up at the ceiling. She lay like that awhile in her ruby bathrobe and a streaming sea of white gold beaming down from the open windows, one leg glowing and exposed and the other hidden beneath, but no one thought to cover her with a blanket because everything felt so warm already. A girl stood just above the headboard and watched her face curiously until a tightly-pinned curl released and fell against her neck. The girl smiled and stepped away. By the end of the day, the guests had opened her wine for themselves and were moving her like a marionette to a record they‘d found in a box of her things. They’d discovered that bringing her baby boy near to her caused her to sigh and heave about uneasily, but more to their amusement, if you held a drink above her and threatened to spill it on her robe, she’d kick you. The women laughed and danced with each other in the far corner of the room and I huddled with a group outside in the freezing rain to have a cigarette. “She didn’t let nobody smoke in her house!” a man said to me, and it was true, but she didn’t really like to have us smoking on the lawn either. A few of us finally drew the curtains; it was nearly midnight and the wine was gone, the food eaten, and she had turned to her right side and flung a palm out dismissively. We closed up all the doors around the time it began to snow, but we left the record player on.