Flawed Memories.

Her hair is black, the bed is white. He glances at her again. The slight tinge of her soft skin stands out against the starkness of the sheets, the only tint in a colourless world. Her pose reminds him of a painting he once saw by Slapapopovic, an image of a photograph in which a motionless woman lies, arms folded, a crown resting upon her head. But that painting…it could not provoke these feelings. No painting, no matter how fine the brush-strokes, how delicate the features, could ever match the beauty before him.
The sheets beneath him rustled silently as he lowers himself beside her. He does not touch her, remaining just beyond physical connection. She is within his reach, but he does not feel a need to touch her, he does not want to wake her. Her hands are folded on her breast, her eyes are closed.
Looking at her from this angle, he sees the wedding dress as they first discovered it. An old Jewish couple, clearly down on hard times, had given it to him in exchange for smuggling their son out. Their son was young, so young he may even have been their grandchild, and he did not understand why he had to leave. The old woman had been torn between the desire to save the boy, and the terrible importance of the wedding dress. She had brought it out, fingers shaking as they held it both tightly and delicately, her eyes filling with tears at the very sight of it.
When he left, dress slung over his shoulder, his last sight was that of the woman, silent tears cascading in rivulets through the rivets in her face, clutching her husband and the child.
Recalling her silence, he finally realises what is missing. He can see his wife. She lies beside him, and he sees once more her dark hair against the brilliance of the sheets. But as he lies there, he cannot feel the cotton rubbing against his skin. He cannot hear the breath escaping from the lungs of the woman beside him, he cannot hear the almost imperceptible catch in her throat that she always made when breathing in. He searches for the faint rising of her chest, for the movement of her lips as she breathes in and out, but they are not there. He reaches towards her, hoping to shake her out of a sleep that too closely resembles death. As he reaches out, she still does not move. She still does not breathe.

She is gone. Memories began to seep through the cracks of his blockade. Happiness. Grief. The images flicker before him, giving him no time to concentrate on each individually. Her voice echoes throughout his mind, particular phrases and words each bearing a multitude of memories. Emotions and feelings almost forgotten re-emerge; the warmth of her body beside his, the tentative touch of her breath and lips upon his neck, the pressure as she clutched his hand, frightful of the future. He clutches at these, trying vainly to separate these from the flow, to hold them within himself. But soon they are replaced. The sun shines down upon his shoulders and forearms, warming him as he uncorks the bottle. Wine trickles down his throat, followed quickly by a lump of warm meat. They sit upon a blanket in the sun, talking little, enjoying one another’s presence. But even though he remembers this much, when she talks, he hears nothing. When she reaches across to touch his arm, he feels nothing. She exists only in memory, he will only hear her voice echoing in the confines of his mind, slowly fading away. He has nothing to remember her by, nothing but a single photo, a tiny snapshot that he will come to base all his memories around. It is the only one they let him take with him when he left quarantine. She is asleep in the photograph, her hair splayed out about her head, and her eyes are closed.
Once more he lies beside her, and her repose is undisturbed by his presence. He watches her chest, waiting for the telltale rise. He knows not whether it will ever come, but it matters not. All he can do is lie there, watch, and wait.

Her skin is so pale that it seems almost colourless. Her posture is hardly that of a sleeper, for her hair spreads out like the petals of a sunflower around her head, and her hands are clasped on her chest. The gauze veil surrounding the bed obscures everything outside the bed, creating a hazy boundary past which he cannot see. His eye automatically focuses on the still shape lying in the centre, the sole solid form in his vision.
This is the way he remembers her. No longer full of life, her vibrant vitality long lost, but still unsullied, untainted by that which devours her from the inside. The image begins to change. At first he does not notice it, so small is the trickle, but soon the pool of scarlet liquid under her head begins to grow. The white dress, her wedding dress, starts to darken and flatten, until the whole lower part of her dress is sodden. The sheets below are being tainted as well, the dark liquid slowly soiling the immaculate. Now even her ebony hair has lost its lustrous sheen, replaced by a polluted gleam. The only movement is the gradual seeping of her life, as it slowly flows outwards, befouling the sheets. Unhurriedly it spreads outwards, a red tide slowly consuming the former whiteness. It creeps slowly outwards, unopposed but for small pockets where the white is bunched up, slowly being subsumed in a tide of scarlet. Very occasionally a spot is able to remain free of the taint, a small shred of white completely alone in the world. Should the dark vermillion force remain unopposed, soon it will begin to change. No longer will it be the red conquering mass that once covered the land. It will settle. It will congeal. It will become a part of the land itself. Only a concerted external effort can do anything to cleanse it’s corruption, and even then, where it has pooled, a stain will linger eternally, a physical memory that can be erased by nought but time.

He notices that the blood has pooled around him as he kneels, rushing down the slight incline to a new area of conquest. Slowly it begins to ascend, and where it touches him his skin goes numb. Bulges begin to form on his legs and chest, soon growing to such large swellings that his stretched skin can no longer contain them, bursting forth in a shower of blood and pus. Her face, previously untouched by the blood that flowed from her very body, is soon splattered with his expulsions. The swellings continue to ooze after rupturing, and his shirt is drenched with his bodily fluids. His body tries to force the foreign entity from itself, soon damaging itself beyond repair in a futile attempt to heal.
The skin upon his neck begins to tighten, and so shocking is the sensation that for a moment his silent writhing is halted. He kneels in pools of blood, dripping more of the same polluted liquid. The puddles do not have time to settle, for the pain strikes him again twofold, and he splashes the liquid all about, spraying the white veil scarlet, as each nerve in his body tries to escape from it’s cursed host. The numbness has long passed, and for a brief sane moment he wishes it would return, to save him from his excruciating agony. The swelling on his neck bursts, and as he falls forward, overbalanced at last, he sees her face, wet with his spatter, surrounded by the very same scarlet oblivion he topples towards.