Three candles burned dimly in a dark room awash with the scent of rose water. Three dirty yellow points of light lit a face, wet and round. The heavily textured walls swam and shifted whenever the door opened or closed but they had been still for some time now. Still and sallow and dull behind the red unblinking face. Rose water and sage and putrid juniper fumes filled the small room with their thick sickly presence. Dense, dark, unflattered by wind or sky.

One whole day and night had passed since the little room had been animated. The three candles held their unnatural flames at their wicks ends, the tallow stalks hadn't melted a drop. The round face too, would have seemed an inanimate, lifeless carving, had anyone seen it. Perfect in feature and form, but dead and breathless. The visage like a moon and her satellite stars flinched suddenly. The gleaming brow furrowed and the shaved scalp blushed. A new color washed the smooth cheeks and red turned violet. The first sound in a days length jarred through the room like an avalanche in a desert. A moan, a grinding of teeth, and finally an exhalation, then black. The candles died in an instant, the face vanished.

There was the slight rustling of rough cloth on smooth, wet skin, the steady pace of new breath and bare feet. The door opened, light spilled in. Three candles stood in a tidy row on a cobbled floor, a dun mat lay behind, and beside sat a brazen bowl brimming with scented herbs and rose water. The place was so simple now, exposed and emptied of it's darkness and ritual.

The figure shuffled slowly out into the dusk. It was a stiff form, robed in simple brown with bald head and naked hands and naked feet exposed. Androgynous and round featured, swimming in the folds of it's robe. Kind with a mother's eyes and firm with a father's mouth, the figure walked from the shade of solitude into the shades of coming night, so tired and so alone.

There is a place, on this evening, that was for so long the home of an anchorite. An old place, filled with stories of nations and kingdoms and the ghosts of the masons who carved it from the still older mountains. It is empty this evening, a tomb for memories cut in the clean angles of stone and softened by time. The anchorite has left this place, a hollow to be filled again, but not tonight. Tonight that figure walks into the red ribbon of the western sky to be swaddled by the night.

I try to imagine how she saw me last night, a birch white boy slipping in, so naked and so white. A ghostly Adonis of the night, striding long legged and keen. I could feel the dark inking in my cavities and shading my hollows. And the brisk dusty film that lit my left shoulder and sharp nose and flitted around my face and my long slender legs. It was holy and beautiful, the sight of me last night. I wasn't a man, a drunk, I was a revelation, a vision.

Just as Lucifer had been stripped of his wings and cast from his place, still beautiful and crooning to himself, I had left my own trail of down and feathers. Marrowless and hollow, flute bones and gummy wads of downy pink flesh. My dignity severed and scattered in parts and peices over miles. Flightless and blind I told Mark how, how to grow wings and use them in the ways I've read about. And then she comes out, weak eyed at night and questioning, routine and relentless, always questioning me. But I am too godlike to be questioned, too tall and too full of ether and flightless passion.

Just how did she see me? Wet in my hair and whetting my tongue on my dim, straight teeth. Mark stood two steps above me, I towered over him. A cripple king, a jealous son of God. And she questioned me, my right and will. She questioned me with eyes and twitching hips and pursed lips. The light was to my left and my jaw cast a shadow that cut into untidy blades of grass. She questioned me and I answered with the fury of a tempest in my breath.

'Oh, hi. I hope we didn't wake you.'

The cripple king speaks. The son of god condescends. Whiskey blooded and hooded in plumes of tobacco smoke. I brush aside the veil of smoke and reveal my shimmering countenance. Birch white and ash hewn. The spittle on my lips is the mead of inspiration.

She is unmoved. She sees a man. A drunk. A bone frame in flesh. A common soul and a frowning face. That must me it. That must be how she sees.

I slip in quietly once she's asleep. I take off my cumbersome clothes. White and whiter still in the wicked dark that hides me. The evening shifts and buckles and I, the pale nephilim, walk through it's petty folds. Quilts and pillows and linens waft through the room. A party of demons and ghouls shake at the wicker frame of night. Things fall. Things break.

Clean cut slabs of street light stripe the bare walls of the soon to emptied room and wrap around my form. There were muffled shouts and curses before, it's very quiet now.

Beside me is a Babel of sorts, a manufactured tower of histories. Shelf after uniform shelf rises flat, rigid. Each is a temple or tomb of sentiment; a scarf, a book, a cigarillo tin, a dozen other testaments to the fact that time is linear. But I am at it's point, it's verging future, it's end looking back with virtuous disgust. I topple the thing. Ashen limbs flash brilliant in the dark room. Long, lean. The empty vessels of memory, time stained and useless now, scatter across the floor. I go out for air.