The cabinet door slammed shut with the force of his meat hands. Chips of paint had flaked down onto the counter like snow teasing the people below. He looked over at her and was not impressed at all. He never had been. Even all those years ago when he had pretended to be impressed in order to get in her pants, he was not. Those days seemed so far away when he would think about them now. She sat there very still, except for her right hand forefinger that shifted the ceramic sugar pot lid back and forth with a twisting motion. The soft fuzzy scraping sound, that distracted from the just slammed cabinet door, irked him to no end. The little green ribbon vine that wrapped itself lustily around the pale pink lid didn’t seem to mind at all, in fact it kind of liked it.

“Do you plan on doing anything today? I mean, anything at all?”, he turned away from her after shooting her his ‘look of death’.

Slowly, she brought her fingertip to a halt and then just as slow as she stopped it, she started to twist the lid again. It was hypnotic to her; it drove all of her memories from her head and allowed her to breathe, to be calm.

Every morning, when she would awake, she felt fooled, duped. She never saw any of it coming, forming, or building. To her it was a simple ‘one morning it was just like that’ sort of event. Sprung up from the basket, spitting venom at her, she realized her past was now her present and the future was not going to change itself unless she acted upon her doldrums and pushed her existence forwards. ‘Forwards’ always seemed like a tough concept for her to really wrap her mind around.

Something about stagnation comforted her, made her feel safe, made her feel in control. If things were never going to change and it was all just that simply predictable then she knew how to deal with it, she knew where it would go. Safe. Darted eyes shot to the left without the head moving one inch; shot back to the right in order to even it all out. Her hair poofed out in jumbled bunches of bird nest splendor and she didn’t mind so much that the brush would do nothing to rectify it today; yet another comfort. She had begun to smell weeks ago and not once did she consider bathing. Soap sounded repulsive. Hot water could only sting like the acid rain of another planet’s belching sulfur clouds. Her smells were her friends. She knew each and every one of them. Thick chewy breath. Cold-cut arm pits. Rotten crotch. Feet like cheese. A naval that had it’s lint on the run. The lint had actually filed a complaint with the board of health and was waiting to hear back. Her condition was putrid but it was ‘her’ condition, 'her' shape, 'her' status; it cradled her and held her warm and tight.

He had to hold his breath when he walked past her as the breeze of his gait would cascade and waft up a stench that turned his stomach and made him belch vomit. He often wondered what had happened. Occasionally, late at night, he would actually feel guilt for his misled advances and promises but he knew she was not wise to the game, the scheme, he had carried out, propelled into her. He used to fill her up whole and she would rest easy. He had been sleeping on an old moth hut of a couch down in the basement for the last two years. He would smoke pot and drink wine and watch old VHS cassettes of shows that did not air anymore. When he had recorded them, he had not edited out the commercials and now he found himself leaving them on so he could pretend that his day was found in another time that only could be recalled, not re-lived. He would purge his miniscule thoughts of penance-needed-to-be-had with the television; the wine and grass just knocked him out and made him forget what it was he had to pay penance for.

Slide, chisel, grind, chatter; it was like sand rubbing against itself in order to get off. Her in a trance, him in a fury; both took what they put out from the sliding porcelain lid. Back and forth, clockwise and back around again. It was as if she were flirting with the idea of picking it up and throwing it at his head, but she could never even dream of being that methodical or intimidating nevermind violent. Violence was not a common place extolment for her, fury was not in her complacent plan, schedule, registry of daily activities found at the bottom of the redundant barrel. She tried to fake a smile but it only came out as some contorted grimace that a sci-fi visage births out as the alien rips from it’s abdomen.

He turned at just the right time and caught the expression, “Are you going to die today or what is your problem?” His tone was very matter-of-fact and beyond condescending. “At least maybe we could hose you down today?!?” She remained mute.

That was simply enough for him, in his book. He spun around swift and went into his ‘office’ for a little busy work reading the paper and flushing himself out. He sat and sat and sat until the bowl was hot. He tidied up and stood to the sink where the gold rimmed, acid washed, mirror frame held his countenance so. As he shot spit from between his teeth, he ran his moistened fingers across his unruly brows in order to pacify the out of line hairs that would, and could, not conform. He often wondered why he did not shear them down to a much more pristine length of manageability but the thought was often cut short by his pre-occupation with face picking. He stood there for the better part of twenty minutes scab hunting. Every pustule in premature development sunk in on itself in order to be flat enough to be overlooked. Poked and prodded, every pore was afraid of his fat fleshy fingers and the nails that were always too long and did significant and sufficient damage to each and every cell. Scrape, push, pry; every nanosecond a mini surgery with the most unsanitary of conditions. Satisfied with his overlook, he had noticed that a good thirty minutes had just melted away while zit scavenging. He grabbed the big glass doorknob and twisted it quick.

She was standing right there, right on the other side of the door. Their noses almost kissed and he could smell her good. Her teeth had what looked like spinach on them but they never ate spinach and he assumed it to be mold or gingivitis fuzz. She could see each zit he had missed in his faux obsessive scrutiny. They stood, nose to nose, eye to eye, as seconds became minutes and blossomed into full blown moments.

Her nails were long and yellowed and she twirled them about in vertical rolling piano practice motions. Her hands stretched out next to her face like psychedelic elephant ears forming and melting and forming again. The shock had frozen him like Lot’s wife, like Medusa’s victims. Awe had crawled down his throat and frozen his heart. Each clock hand motion swung down like ant legs in jelly, forcing their way into motion with the painful desire to move forward.

His cheeks grew hotter than the toilet had been just thirty two minutes ago. Palpitations were telling him something was not right. He went to open his mouth and speak but his words were eaten by the numbing in his arm. Anger gnawed fury, fury masticated rage; all became as silent as a mime in handcuffs. He fell to the floor like a sopping wet bath mat and twitched a bit like a baby bird guzzling down nourishment from it’s mother’s throat. Her fingers kept swirling about; magic fingers, magic moment. He stopped moving as his tongue rolled out and pressed against a rusty sink pipe when his head fell flat to the floor.

The moment had lifted the air and made the sun seem to disappear. The light became pearled and opaque and almost tunnel-like to her through her sleep caked eyes. Her fingers twirled more slowly now. She bent over him like a voodoo doctor seeing the white man for the very first time. Curiosity flared her pupils wildly. She tediously licked her parched, cracked lips and she spat down hard onto his tongue.

She went to the old hi-fi cabinet and rolled back the recessive top. Fumbling with knobs and delicately hitting switches with the patience of a naïve scientist throwing ideas against a think tank wall. It all finally clicked and the warm soft air of the white noise began to fill the air. Static serenity. The glow of the orange band with it’s large sharp needle to designate the station, it pointed to the wall and for a minute or two she stared at the wall and asked herself if the noise really came from that point on the horse hair dry wall. It did not and she was content in that conclusion. The bows began to drag, the strings began to reverberate; the air was filled with the colours of play at hand, of existence long not spoken, of days that never knew nights.

When the cello of this Haydn concerto came flushing itself up to the surface, she found an overwhelming sense of redemption in her madness, in her soul, beyond her heart. She began to feverently laugh the giddy shrieks of the succubus. She felt light, weightless, and glided back to the bathroom past the mass clumped on the floor. As she past him, she gently kicked his ankle twice and noted to herself, and to the mirror, that it was for 'good luck'. She sat on the edge of the claw foot tub and twisted about the strings at the nape of her house dress. They were never tied, but rather stained and mangled as if someone’s child had used them for teething. She felt every thread of the fabric; the rough and smooth patches, the areas that had dried and grown stiff with stains. She gently, most maternally, tapped her long claws down onto the skyward pointed spokes of the four armed knobs of hot and cold that majestically, and quite regally, stood their posts at the head of the bathing vessel. It was as if Haydn, himself, was conducting her to the black shot ink staffs of his written spirit.

Smoothly, she turned the captain’s wheel of hot counter-clockwise, thinking of the sugar pot lid, and much to her surprise the water was already piping hot. The rusted bilboes had been broken. Steam drifted upward and began to melt off the flesh grease that had caked on her cheeks.