Fogged (notes)

Crabs along the wider paves and slabs and half-cocks his leg making it to the hedged-in passage leading to the front door humming and hovering almost on toes and light-stepping in a precarious dance one foot the other as he reaches into one pocket and the side pocket in reach of the key and then slides it in, slips it in, forces it hard into the lock and he’s in now where he can be who he is and how and with back almost parodically against the door stands defeated and he knows defiled again by want or by his own flimsy useless will relents and gives it full bloom. That thing that thing that thing wanted and humbling and altogether wrong. Fantastic couplings for one wretched second. Panting like a bloody beast. Stamping and snorting. Stopstopstop. Stop.

Across the hall he can see that the table is laid. A glass of spring water holding particles swirling and he’s not yet convinced that the water is not in fact somehow contaminated, unclean – that it has not in fact eddied around the carcass of a bloat-felled lamb or some filthy cloven hoof before being sloshed into that glass which God knows may not be clean and will hold a memory, an infringement, some bacilli or curse that will clench his gut awake at early dawn and condemn him to hours spent wringing a gritty gruel from his remorseless insides. A flood that will wash away all the good along with all the bad and leave him hollowed in its wake.

Sounds of domesticity – of cutlery. Shirt’s yardage cooling at the placket’s tuck – gusset spotted and likely rank, reasty. Only seconds have passed since he swooped birdlike into this house and his head has yet to clear, fogged, turpid. The fluttering or clanging at his chest; the damp palms; the unmodulated and tremulous voice that startles as it deepens. She has really empowered herself, she is paler now.