The world is gauzy and edgeless and she fades into its fogged boundlessness, her cheek to her pillow. The muscles in her face relax, and she looks, in the vague bedroom moonlight, both older and younger than the 45 years she in fact has traveled. Her dark hair tangles and curls at her neck, smudgy inky tendrils that press against her skin as though to mark her . . . a vulnerable snaked woman in need of stone’s impenetrability.
She falls asleep as she generally falls asleep, on her right side, curled up small. Her knees and her elbows are gathered in sharp triangles. Her right hand cradles her right temple and cheekbone. The backs of her left hand’s fingers spread below her pale jaw. Both hands work in unknowing cooperation to cushion this woman’s journey into her unconscious.
Her wedding ring sparkles silver in the sudden shimmer of a brighter moon, and her lips part slightly as she breathes in the darkness.
Shadows spill through the windows and across the floor.
She breathes deeply through parted lips as the shadows consider.
Silhouetted foliage to umbrage . . . form is taken.
A shape-shifting thumb runs ghostly along the fullness of her lower lip, gently at first. As is always the case, however, gentle does not satisfy and gentle does not last; there is a deeper damper exploration and her lip yields beneath a pressing dragging touch. The invitation of this small wet curve is impossible to resist, and so there is no resistance.
Surrender to weakness strengthens the shadows.
Umbrage is formed and form is taken.
A thumb becomes a hand.
A hand of intentional shadows rests, fingers spanned, across her sleeping face. The hand moves, five trails coursed along her features. The familiar hardness of bones beneath softer skin, the small domed rise of eyeballs beneath lids, the rise of her nose and the dip from nose to her upper lip; each is shadowed and remembered and claimed anew. There is an indistinct gray shudder at the impossibly soft yielding of her lower lip, a lip that rolls beneath a remembered touch and invites a damp embrace.
Surrender to weakness strengthens the shadows.
Umbrage is formed and form is taken.
A man of shadows stands over her sleeping form and casts a shadow of his own.
A shadow across her flesh.
A shadow across her dreams.
A shadow across the years that she has traveled to sleep in this bed.
He plays his fingers along her cheek and then follows the course that she has set out for him . . . along her cheek and her jaw and her chin to the back of her hand whose fingers rest below her face. He taps a small encircling rhythm against the delicate bones of her wrist and then continues along her arm, delighting in the downy warmth. He takes a sharp turn at her elbow and continues upward to her shoulder, resting a firm hand against the pale expanse of her skin, allowing himself to remember the skin of another who is also this woman.
Another woman whose lips and mind and skin yielded beneath him.
A slow descent of skin on skin as he follows the course she has set out for him . . . from shoulder to neck. The invitation of this small downward curve is impossible to resist, and so there is no resistance. He brushes aside the swoops of her hair and reaches for the vulnerability she offers him.
He encircles the vulnerability she offers him.
He tightens his grip on that which is his.
She sleeps and breathes through parted lips; she inhales deeply of the darkness.
A breath she is unable to release.
His grip tightens as she struggles to consciousness and life. He wants her to feel the grip of shadows around her throat. He wants her to know what she has invited. He wants her to see what she offers in the secrecy of her dreams. He wants her to know that he cannot resist. He could never resist.
He wants her to see him.
Umbrage is formed and form is taken.
She wakes in confused panic, unable to breathe, and she is filled with the certainty that she is about to die at the hands of one who was. She gasps for darkened breath and waits for the shadows that fill the room to rise again and come for her. Frozen and teary and filled with terror, she waits for death.
Time passes in which she remains alive. She works to reclaim her place in her present. She struggles to calm her breathing, and these struggles wake her husband, who reaches for her sleepily. He rests a hand against her shoulder and begins a slow descent of skin to skin as she weeps and breathes.
Her husband’s touch grows more urgent, and she gives herself, seeking distraction from the shadows of the past. She gives herself to the moment, but she does not expect to lose herself in this moment. She is startled when the turbulent disparate emotions that swirl within her coalesce and become something else. She is swept away on a tide of panic and fear and trust and love and pain and joy, and she is overwhelmed by the enormity of this surrender that feels more like a taking.
She turns away from her husband.
She cannot stop crying.
She breathes in the darkness as she curls up small. She tucks her hands beneath her face as she always does. Times passes in which she does not die, and so eventually she sleeps.
She breathes deeply through parted lips as shadows consider.
She dreams and her dreams are filled with cruel laughter.
The laughter of a shadow.
Umbrage given form so that it might take . . .
everything.
