[Reaction.]
It's cold, but a different cold. A different cold, and it's the opposite of warm and filled with flowers and tapestries and pictures of people she's never met. It's cold, like cold in a book. Like a novel that people love and talk about and talk about, but she just feels cold. In that bed, alone, and the taste of chipboard on her tongue. It feels like home, the room, familiar, like home, like home, but nothing like a home, and it's sad.
The marble is beautiful.
As she lies there, thinking about it, she thinks it's beautiful. Rolling down the back of her throat, down and down and down, and she touches where it maybe lives. She tries not to think about the dead in the bed, in their graves, in their nothingness. Just then, in the moment, she hasn't died. She doesn't know it, but it's there and it looms and she knows it breathes on her every, every, every day.
And then it's over, and she is dead, and there is no marble with whorls of galaxies. There's nothing beautiful like that inside her, and there never has been, and there never will be. She's lost in constellations, and the moonlight outside makes her think of being caught at that window. She touches low, low, low, where she has her own scar. Crescent and long, and she often wondered why she still has it. Why didn't he have all the imperfections removed? But maybe he liked them, the bumps and ridges and scar tissue he caused. But this scar, this one had nothing to do with him, and she thinks about the window and the bodies tossed away like nothing.
She shudders, and the night suddenly feels too cold. This one memory, this one makes her shudder and pull the blankets to her head, some small child seeking safety in cotton.