Excerpt from Untitled

The door creaks once at the touch of her fingertips, then swings open in smooth silence. The room is at once sparse and lavish, empty save for the piano bench and the wooden harp and the pale, billowing bedsheet that hangs over the window in place of a curtain. Deep shadows wobble across the floor, shifting with each subtle breath, with each flutter of the air. This room provides no view of the sunrise, of the sky’s first blood-stained breath or of the rising wind’s fierce twist. Instead, it envelops her in darkness, in a heavy, early-morning gray that settles over the watchful air. The setting moon hangs in one corner of the open window. It laps silver at the legs of the worn leather bench, runs a firm gray hand down the wooden curves of the harp. She is reminded of how the gray tide slips ever further from the shore, of how white sand crumbles underfoot, cool and coarse between her toes, of how the earth rushes towards her as the waves pull away, leaving her ankles cold and her knees trembling.
The moonlight shrouds her shudders, winds itself around the rise and fall of her breath. She moves towards the window, ducks behind the sheet. It drapes lightly over her shoulders, wrapping her in its own pale world. Dying moonlight rushes in, tracing patterns on the pale cloth behind her, alighting on the scattered floorboards beneath her bare feet and casting her papery hands in soft, fragile white. She lifts a palm to the glass. It feels like wax beneath her fingers, soft and cool and lenient, as if it will cling to her form long after she is gone.
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