a return to the house of death (10)

For weeks now he had seen the memories of others like dreams and the house was full of them. The past and the future had engulfed the present and one another and all that remained were isolated occurrences shorn of greater meaning. The wheelchair followed his thoughts in desolate silence. During lucid moments he imagined life continuing, taking employment, discovering romance, starting again. He washed the dirt from his hands and body but the smell remained for it had moved inside and become of thought. He folded her remains carefully within their best linen, a present from her mother when they had moved into the house, and returned it to the grave he had dug once before. While he felt little as he did so he was aware that he should and so said goodbye although this was not goodbye but only something happening then that at another time wouldn’t be. Everything was a minor event that bore a universe around it of absolutely no consequence. She would return tomorrow, yesterday, a week from now, or wouldn’t. Little matter. The bodies of their friends were less decomposed and far messier and he sloshed them into sheets and buried them in a shared grave and the utility of the unconscionably large flowerbed became clear. For them he said nil but they had been good friends in their way. He would forget them. He already had. The wheelchair watched him work. He climbed the stairs back into the house and walked its hallways and rooms. There were many voices speaking but nothing discernible; as one they roared into obsolescence. He tried to recall if he had always heard them but conceptually always meant so little as this was this only until that was this. He went upstairs and into their bedroom and in the bottom of the wardrobe found his better belt. He tied it firmly around his neck in the way that he had shown her. The sunlight that shone through the window on the stairs was dulled by the weight of the dreadful cloud but was quite beautiful. He had never noticed it before and had thought the window was a mirror, that the houses and gardens and trees across the old loam pit were its remarkable revelations. He stood on the top of the bannister and pulled himself up to the open loft hatch and tied the belt around a timber joist. The house around him moaned in celebration. There was a ringing in his ears and a great elation and his vision clouded in a roseate hue and yet he saw everything at once and felt fiercely holy. This would not be happening tomorrow.