an eighty third story...'bath time'

The air is thick with steam, a film of condensation on the white-washed walls, the painted ceiling, on the slippery, wet linoleum floor.  The single-pane sash window is fogged with mist.  There’s a maroon coloured bath towel, and a bundle of saturated clothing discarded alongside the big, grey-green copper bath tub, supported by four great brass feet.  In the bathroom mirror someone has scrawled bath time in toothpaste using their fingers, the words bath time illuminated by the shaving light, casting a soft, subterranean glow through the cloud of vapours rising from the bath tub. 

On a thin glass shelf underneath the bathroom mirror there is an ashtray filled with moist ash and cigarette ends, and a half-finished tumbler of cheap red wine, fermenting in the damp.  The sink bowl has lime scale residue around the plug hole, there are scraps of left over blue tissue paper flecked with blood, and in the soap dish, a razor blade. 

Attached to the painted ceiling is a steel bath rail, and from it hangs a faded yellow bath curtain, shrouding one half of the bath tub.  Behind the shroud is his fleshy silhouette, lying with his bare back to you, and with both bare arms resting on the sides of the bath tub.  The taps have not been shut off, and there is a steady drip from the taps into the soap-sudded bath water. 

Time slows.  You catch your breath a moment. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You notice the slowly evaporating impression of his footprints on the slippery, wet linoleum floor. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You smell for the first time the sweetness of his tobacco smoke hanging suspended in the thick, steamy air. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You wonder why he always comes back to you, why he ever left you in the first place.  

Drip, drip
drip drip.

Then, as you reach to pull back the bath curtain, you wake in a patch of sweat, find your reading light still burning, and the early morning raindrops sliding like slow, silent tears down the bedroom skylight above the unmade bed, where you - wrapped in your stained bath robes - have been plumbing the depths of another uneasy sleep.