Fall, apart

It is time for her to draw the tub, and gently turn the hot water knob an extra twist...the air outside in the blackness carries wind and the smell of fires.  Little bouts of steam ascend as the waters pool, the heated water against the cold porcelain of the bath.  She places her head against a window and sees a few chimneys emptying with ghostly smoke that is white in the air.  Her breath fogs the window and she writes a name before smearing it gone.

It has been a long time since she has knelt in front of a fire, loading smaller sticks and kindling, the flames licking eagerly at the dry rot wood...consuming the sticks and creating the bed of embers needed.  He had been consumed by her in a similar way, the slow let of dry tinder easing its way into her world...like a tiny string that caught flame and hurried its way upwards towards the hand that held it.

And in these last full days of Summer, the dark coffers of the fireplace lay dry, darkened from the heat of past days and nights, a tattoo of a time when it rose incandescent.  Warming the room, drawing the eye...the way she would in the days past.

Driving past muddy fields, of exhausted hay, the smudged earth just tired...the sun low in the sky and already getting darker earlier each day...the crisp wind is biting, no longer any respite...now it stings and hisses, wrapping cold hands around your neck and clutching you to make you cold.

Another car ahead, taillights in the distance...people heading home, returning to friends, families...a lover.  He hated the absence...the distance.  He felt stale...stalk of corn-like, rustling in the breeze, burnt out by the sun, merely waiting to fall over in the field and be consumed by the earth.  He wanted to feel her, the entrance of her cold feet into his bed, her cold hands coming for his torso, the invasion of her morning air body meeting his overnight sleep warmth temperature.  Her teeth sometimes even chattering in his ear as her nakedness slowly pooled from cold to warm...her porcelain skin slowly starting to glow, the heat raising briefly her temperature...

Like the warming waters of her tub...which she stirred with her toes, naked in the bathroom, the waters almost too hot to sit in but it was too cold to stand.  

She poured in some handful of salts, and stirred them further...the scent of filigree rising...it smelled nothing like Fall...it smelled what he smelled like when they were together.