A/N: With apologies to Elizabeth Bishop.
I.
The first time it happens, they are in the shower together. His fingers trace portraits in soap across her tits, her hips, and when he reaches for the smooth, bare slit that always welcomes him, the flecks of foam on his hands turn pink. The relentless pulse of water wipes them clean again, halts for a moment the chariot at his back. Provides a caesura between happiness and…whatever comes next.
But he can't ignore the sob that wrestles in her throat like a cat trapped in a sack.
The water beats down on them both, hearts torn in mirror image, huddled twins in a glass and marble womb.
II.
The next time plays out in a hospital. He wonders, fleetingly as they roll her away, if she'll prefer it this way. She can pretend she's in one of the shows she watches on her laptop when she thinks he's in another room, those medical spectaculars with gorgeous interns humping their brains out in between injecting their patients with industrial-strength cleaners instead of penicillin.
Later, their doctor sits across a desk from them, stacks of papers and the backs of photo frames marking the boundary between her world and theirs. She speaks slowly, and her words seem to travel a great distance before they reach him. Everything she says reverberates, waves of sonic interference coating the suggestions and statistics and brusque but ostensibly comforting assertions of randomness and chance.
No one's fault. He could just tattoo it on his chest, save them all the trouble of repeating it every five years or so.
Her hand is limp and cold in his. He rubs her fingers to warm them up, but the kindling doesn't take.
III.
He doesn't believe in God, and he never prays. He finds himself in a church anyway. Midtown. Fifth Avenue Something-or-Other, and there's dark wood and polished brass and stained glass and stone walls. He'd like to build something that unbending.
In a discreet private office ten blocks away, sleep seeps slowly into her veins through a needle's point, and he should be there, but this time he's not. This time, he watches the light pour through St. Anthony's robes, coating the flagstones in purple.
A hat trick, he thinks, closing his eyes. Some kind of prank anyway.
IV.
The last time it happens, they do not touch. They do not speak. He doesn't even look at her. But he can tell that, finally, she blames him.
The table's motor whirs as the doctor lowers her hips and stands to shut off the monitor's silent screen. Her pale thighs pass in his peripheral vision, the white-and-green hospital gown hiked to her waist.
He turns on his plastic chair to stare at the door and the two black coats hanging side-by-side from hooks, her two black shoes beneath them.
And the part of him that picks at scabs to watch them bleed; the part of him that remembers how to dance on the edge of a rooftop; the very small part of him that still longs to make her happy knows what she's thinking and…
Agrees.
