I see through it, that this is the landing of the staircase of her house, and here I have stood for who knows how long, where nothing has come nor gone, nothing has happened, and no light has been. There is a little light of the kind that makes mist glow, and now I see a panel of moonlight at my feet. Am I narrating now? It creeps snailishly along the bare boards and the wafer of wan rug, leaving behind it an oyster track of nacreous sperm. All a dream, that’s certain. I find I can see the motion of this patch of moonlight; the leading edge is cloudy but firm, but for some reason my vision imparts a trickling to it. It shines now on the hem of a skirt, so that the color of the skirt and the color of the moonlight can’t be differentiated.

I look to my left, and see a face in the dim, inches away. I see the scattered light of her face and her hands, interrupted by leopard spots of dark as though she were spattered with paint, or piebald with sores. Perhaps her fragrant, rich dress is only paint? Is she only painted on the door? There’s a spot of paint on her right cheek, or isn’t there? One of those ghostly hands rises and presses itself to my chest, sliding luxuriously inside my jacket and up past my heart.

Hollowly she says, “I want to love you” and it seems to be a variety of similar phrasings all said at once.

Her living skirts rise up closing around me and her hand, glued on my chest, pulls me forward. She draws me into her shade as weightless as a spirit, and I watch from some distance as we drift backwards together and dwindle out of sight like a starved candle ebbing out.

*

I go to her door that morning, but it is dusty, and no one comes when I knock. There is no motion, nothing but the sopping hiss of the trees. So I take the bottle, which I have adorned with a silly pink satin bow I found in the street, and leave it, with a card, in the lee of the stone doorway.

Hands in pockets I trudge through the streets and there at my back I have the weight of my uniform, my medic’s pack, waiting to take me over and make a soldier out of me. What will I do with my school uniform? Perhaps I ought to bury it with a brief service. I don’t want to change.

The gates of the college are barred, the windows are broken and empty. The district is empty. I turn and see only the distempered movements of trash, leaves. Not even a rat stirs in the gutters, nothing.