Now she faces north
Now she faces north once more. Sun, somewhere over my left shoulder racing across the southern sky. Now she glances upward. Her eyes are too narrow. Her hair is rather frayed. The louring day reflects upin this disease of apartment blocks that I pass slowly and I come to a full stop before it. Now the action of ultimate deceleration causes the hair resting on her left shoulder to slide limply to her chest. There I am halted before a darkened disease. The dying luminance against the stucco returns to me carrying a bouquet of jaundice, a floral, yet plastic and pock-marked hue that in other nights might calculate out to warmth. The nights of others. This pallour is of the idleness practiced by a stucco that takes what it is given by the elements. When it rains, gutterless eaves shrug warm water over the walls. In blazing day the southern sun torments the shell as it lays immobile, possibly twitching in vain to shake away small flakes of its own decaying skin. Yet, in its suffering she cannot move or take action, quiescent even in the approach of continual debasement. More often than this cowing, the skies are fair and the breezes dance charitably from the sea to lay their golden kiss upon that recumbant facade. Still it remains inert with its silhouette idly welcoming the dusk with a treasonous false zeal seeming to insist a preference for the shadows, while limply continuing to receive helpings of reward from the sun as it dives. The car rocks forward and she leans back on her left shoulder. Her face and neck are envious and icteric.
The firmament, in drapings of uncolouring itself, seeps begreyened winter nights out of the early spring heavens. The faint outlines of the roofscape horizon remain slightly hovering outside the mist. Or, it is as if those places have disappeared into a sort of medium being in which they are shaped and filled of the leaden sky but sit just in front of it, almost crowned in darkness by a contact shadow. I could hook my fingertips around their drawn extents. Sorrow. They seek to step out from the nightening background across a hoary lawn and crumble its grains in repentance. The sun is seen racing away loathe to receive supplications and leaving them scattered and smeared with ash from its flaming last caress. On my knees it could entreat the sun to step slightly back out of the sea where it throws senescent lines of wavering steel out across the sleep. Bent there though, in expectation of full night it makes no gestures to stand out of its half mourning pose where beneath its hulking fold I desire to curl and repent to the sun, a lukewarm and low collection spat out of the dusk. She opens her eyes slightly now. She looks slightly above the line of the window and to the left, away from the direction of travel. Were I to open my eyes slightly now this scene would stand in as the limp sorrow of dawn transported here in an acceleration of the ages. So it is, in these halfway atmospheres where slim figures grow lined and canescent, that a slightly parted glimpse, if only for the second between the full stops of light and dark or dark and light, offers onto an aged, crumbling lot.