A Room with a Corpse

It is there on the floor.  "So, set fire to it," the man says bad-temperedly who I only this afternoon brought in from the night carrying that paper bag all crumpled and puppet-like in his shadowy hand.  "If you want to, I will leave it to you to do," I say in a minute or two.  From the porch he follows me into a strikingly forlorn front garden with fat rubbery plants and a high wall around it like a defense against cemetery intruders who probably have good reason to shout with all their shrewdness on top of this secret hill.  Anyway, I am charmed at the possibility of being assassinated by fire-throwers.  I look at my ex-husband with unresponsiveness too keen to show my suspicions.  Then I sit down concealed in a deep cradle of weeds below the dwelling's pitched roof, which is ruinous despite my kind of furniture which I lugged behind me all the way from a tremendous rough country.  I reason he is a cruel agent of assassination and my senses nearly leave me, but then he asks, "Would you be glad about a cup of sour wine?" which even I have to disclose is big first-rate decorum! 

I wait there until a late hour.  I am friendless and without the lamp!  Having detected the falsity of his earlier offer of refreshment, I vow never to see him again.  But, shortly, I apprehend his presence by the murmur of his not-far-distant voice.  It seems highly improbable, however I am forced to admit that he is talking inside with a Sister of the Holy Office of X.  I hear the door as it's barred and watch through the filthy (locked) window as the two together begin to mount the steps, jerking to and fro, she with his assistance and he merciful to give it. 

They have definitely stopped right outside the bedroom door.  I'm sure that together they are moving within a few yards of my bed, sitting or sipping tea under the eiderdown or within a few yards of my bed.  I locate a piece of wood in the mostly empty grass and use it to break into my own dwelling with its cold linoleum and nothingness.  There is detectable movement on the other side of the floor above my head. 

I inquire aloud whether Mr. D is still here.  I consider rushing up the stairs and hauling them over the coals, but don't do it.  How could they possibly know that today I would be the central character in a mystery of my own making?  What motive was there?  I hear them move on the floorboards directly above my head and onto the bed with its creaking.  By now they've quite possibly broken to smithereens the blue-veined china I tenderly packed and lugged behind my back from a gloom thick with junipers and thickets!

Through the keyhole their faces are blurred, limp, satiny.  He's done now, finishing up, buttoning.  She will have traveled miles through the forest to have become the person uttering there.  Soon I apprehend murmurs of more civilized feelings: "My darling, my mud spattered lover." But what has he even been doing here, pulled in from the dump, a nutcase?  Through the keyhole could it possibly be he is perched upon my pile of rubbish in the corner, precariously bending over you?  Other hints I could give you, which would be strong and dreadful.  But tears are flowing from the now genuinely thankful nun's eyes and someone is shouting beyond the walls around my garden invoking something, crying about: "Everything is left and left will turn queer!"

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