It's Still Life

Sulphur and Silence

The city never learned how to be quiet — Elias liked it that way; the noise smothered his wife’s laugh. He sat in his worn armchair, the one she always called a mistake, watching the world blur past his third-floor flat.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes moved like a stalking thing, sulphurous and patient. It peered in — not with mercy but with hunger. It was the same fog that waited the night Clara left for the pharmacy, and she didn’t come back.

Elias didn’t reach for the whiskey. He reached for the window latch. A damp tendril slid through the crack, smelling of diesel and old rain. It curled round his wrist like a binding; when he tried to wrench free the room tilted and a cold palm pushed him outward.

The ground never came.