Her bra slipped off, revealing her breasts that were waiting for his touch. Her dress, a shift of white cotton, had dropped to her hips, and bunched up around her thighs. She was holding a white lilly, drooping gently in her hand, its petals beginning to slake off like dried skin, which she had plenty of around her lips, the color strawberries.

He despised himself at that moment, for wanting her, for being afraid. She turned her back to him, revealing a marble plynth topped with a mop of green that reminded him of leaves, and for a second she resembled a palm tree. "I am not afraid anymore", she had whispered, and he had been happy.

Now it was he who was afraid, in a night of lengthening shadows and satin sheets, and a woman who winds around his legs like a river, it is he who is moored to his own shore like an abandoned skiff wallowing in the moonlight, water rippling, rippling, away from wood that slips, sliver by sliver, into the water, thousands of shards floating farther and farther from shore.