a wax salon · seven rooms · one candle
A glove rests where she has left it on the side-table, fingers still curled in the shape of a hand that is no longer there. The wax has half-claimed it. To enter is to find a thing made warm by recent presence — an apartment that has not yet learned of its loneliness. The hallway smells faintly of orange peel and beeswax. You do not call out. You have been expected.
On the writing desk, a sheet folded into thirds, its creases gone soft as if the paper itself had warmed in your hand. The wax seal is fresh; a thumbprint still lives in it. There is no signature. The handwriting tilts forward as though leaning toward the reader, anxious to arrive. You read it twice. The second reading is the slower one, the one that confesses what the first had hidden in plain syllables.
The chaise has held the shape of her shoulder for an hour now and refuses to forget. Silk velvet, the color of low embers, learns more than it forgets. One reads, here, on one elbow, the body folded into the question the room is asking. There is no clock in this room. There is one window, and the window is closed.
A coupe, half-full, has been waiting on the mantelpiece since before the candle was lit. The meniscus catches what light it can. Bubbles have long since left it. To drink it now would not be to drink champagne but to drink the hour itself — the hour in which someone decided to leave the glass there, and the longer hour in which they did not return. A toast to nobody. A toast read aloud anyway.
A hand-mirror lies face-up on the dressing table; its handle has wilted, as though tired of being held. The glass reflects only the candle, doubling the single source of light into a small private pair. To look into it now is to find oneself accounted for — not by the room, not by the absent lover, but by a second flame which has agreed, briefly, to keep one company.
The sealing wax has pooled into the shape of a six-petalled lily, pressed once and pressed truly. It is the only red in the apartment. It is the colour an ear becomes when a name is whispered too close to it. Some things are sealed not to keep them shut but to mark the precise instant in which they ceased being a question.
and then, very softly, the lock