a return to the house of death (9)

He woke early though it could have been late, it had become difficult to tell. The air in the room was as heavy around him as swarming adults. Her body was in parts skeletonized, soft tissues shed like an immense burden. He fingered the visible parts of bone with fascination and they felt smooth and thrilling, and perfect. He leaned over her and ran his tongue around the hollow cavity of her mouth, her teeth, the remnants of stretched black skin around the bottom of her face; he loved her in a way that would have been impossible during life, with absolute commitment. The head of their mutual friend stood vigil on the pillow, the eyeballs putrefied and spewed from their sockets in murky rivers. He had placed the body and the body of their other friend into one of the guest rooms, positioned carefully on top of the bedclothes. The flies had returned for their great unveiling and he felt surrounded in a way resembling great popularity. Their fragile structures sank inwards. In the bathroom he urinated with some effort, the piss dark and syrupy. He was dehydrated and very undernourished. He took a sip from a cup of day-old instant coffee and went downstairs and to the living room. He recoiled very marginally but felt no surprise that the wheelchair had returned. The blood on its seat was thicker if anything and even more plentiful and still sticky, the smell familiar and pleasing. He sat opposite the wheelchair and looked at it for several minutes and remembered carrying it to the skip. If it spoke at all which of course it didn’t, if such things were possible within the very fabric of normality it said ‘behold my structure, for present is of but past and future only and at once and nothing more but some’, but of course it didn’t. He stood and instead sat in the wheelchair, lowering himself deliberately into the seat and feeling the blood smearing against and between his buttocks like the most intimate embrace. The chair shifted slightly under his weight. The universe itself was unforgiving but he alone, he thought, had learnt. He gripped the handrims and felt awash.