Grace Sutcliffe.

He was dancing at a wake the day after he lay dying in this bed.

In my bed. A good man would not return after seven years of no word just to nearly die in the bed of the woman he abandoned. A good man would never have abandoned a woman he claimed to love in the first place. A good man would have wrote.

The colour were back, full, in his face. I could see sweat forming on his neck, soaking a dark rim on the edge of his borrowed collar. He arrived with only the clothes on his back, and they were so blood-soaked they had to be burned. I was trying not to watch, to concentrate on the ladies chatting around me, but couldn’t help myself. I saw a drip of sweat pool in his hair and roll down the back of his neck. It glistened like dew in the candlelight.

The last time I saw that neck, before he left, before the looms grew dust and the farms turned to mud, it was in my hands. All of him was in my hands, and me in his. My sweat was his sweat, his breath was my breath, and we saw dawn rise with the same sight. How can he now be a stranger to me?

I feel his warmth here, now. As though in those last gasping moments before he nearly slipped away to hell the straw beneath soaked up his final warmth and held it here for me.

On the steps outside his father’s wake, I saw the hot breath escaping his throat as he spoke. I listened not to his words but watched the vapour appear and vanish and it was all my will not to step forward and try to catch it in my mouth. As though capturing his breath again in my lungs would prove to me more than sight that he truly was still living, that he was not an apparition sent to torment me. I daren’t touch him.

I held my hands against the stone walls as we talked, turned away, our voices echoing down different alleys. The stone warmed beneath my hands and fed me back its icy resolve: do not move, hold fast girl, do not go to him. And now I lie alone in the indent of his chaos Death has joined my side, a sisterhood of those left alone after he promised to stay.

What trouble he has come back to cause I know not yet. What trouble can be roused when there is no bread to fuel it? Revolution formed from rotted roots. Who would be fool enough to follow him? So asks the fool who yearns for him, still.