Prostitutes -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
She opened her eyes at last to a day pale wornout. She lay in her bed,
under the haggard morning as under a wet sheet. She was unable to move.
“I am sick,” she said aloud. Then again she slept.
When she awoke it was still day. Sharp stillness. She heard the blood
beat in her temples. Her body was blanched, it was dead. Her head lay
hot and swollen above an inert body.
She shut her eyes. The day swathed her head in myriad light shawls. One
by one the shawls withdrew, they were gone. She opened her eyes against
black Nothingness. It raced into her eyes, it won her swollen head. But
her body it could not touch. Her body like a knife-thrust lay, white and
still, within the belly of night.
--I must get up. She tried to get up and could not. She lay in her warm
water. Her body prevailed. The water was cold. It was dry. Her head
scolded against her stricken body. Her body endured like a bar of steel.
It was solid death in a melted world that was dying.
There were days and there were nights. There were nights and there were
days. The world winked open, the world winked shut. Rain dribbled into
her window: sunbeams deflected lay like gold dust against it. Below, in
the houses, feet fell; voices rose, fell; shadows of human will writhed
up the twisted stairs to her white room: no substance followed. She was
alone: her blanched dead body and her boiling head. Beneath her a great
Void in which the sounds of doors and feet and words, the rumble of a
cart, angled about like little balls of celluloid in a great hollow
caldron.
Day night day ... the world winked dimmer. Fanny’s form lay like a
wave-washed beam on the edge of the sea. Color was long since washed.
The water sucked at the meat and the juice of the wood. It was porous
light, it was rotten before the ceaseless suck of the water of the sea.
Her head was lower. It no longer boiled above her body.
Then Fanny shut her eyes: and her eyes were all of her head that was not
like her body ... dim and porous and sucked.
“Is this what all was for?” said her eyes. “Have I gone through all
this--all this--to die like a cat in a barn?”
She knew she was not to die.
“I am going to die. My life has been nonsense ... and now I am going to
die.”
She knew she was not to die.
Her eyes were still. There was a great Pain clenching her breast and her
bowels. No pain had been before.
“How long have I been lying here? How many days ... is it weeks?... I
have not eaten? Will nobody come?”
Her body was Pain. Her body was coming alive, so it was Pain.
“Will no one come? Will you let me die like a cat? I am thirsty ... I am
sick! I cannot move. I danced too much. I am paralyzed with Dancing.
Don’t let me die.”
Her body was coming alive, so that it cried.
“Edith ... Edith, save me! Harry--won’t you nurse me? I have nursed you
so often. Water! My child! O Mother ... Clara I did not mean----“
Her body was coming alive, so that it was afraid. It screamed, it lied,
it abused: it wanted the water of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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