There was nowhere to go. The woman stood watching tired leaves, thinking about her death. Nowadays it felt just one breath away. They had warned her, he had warned her, everyone had spoken of the final haemorrhage; their safe clinical words separating themselves from this person she had now become. More leaves thrown up by the wind, a golden, bloodied carpet for a brief future and so many stories she would never write. Never never never she whispered into a black woolly glove. Wet prayerless words. Now who had bought her such harsh luxury? She couldn’t find the name, even when she shook her head listening at the past, and her mouth burnt against the damp heat of the glove.
It was that coffee that had raised her up a little, had made her nod almost agreeably, but here she was alone again, shaking her head at the dissolving threads of memory. She pulled the hat lower over her cold ears. Muddy water skimmmed over her boots, darkening them and a crow landed in front of her, its head on one side calling to a companion she had not seen. If she was supersitious she would call this an omen, but the woman was less than any simple sadness today, yet more too. For she had enjoyed the coffee, that synchrony of spoons and the face across the table – more than anything; she corrected herself; more than anything she had felt for a very long time. And it was time that she missed. She missed the carelessness of health. She had written several stories she had enjoyed, yet her characters never seemed to do very much either. They lived small, tiny existences somehow. Always stood on steps or at windows looking in. But where could she have sent them that she would have believed in? There was nowhere.