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Dripping rainwater on the little carpet that she had put just inside the doorway, I shook out my hair and hung my coat. I put water on to boil, turned out all the lights. This morning's paper had still been strewn across the living room, front page curled beneath the coffee table. Sports tucked beneath business behind her chair. I liked imagining archaelogists coming in to the house after I was gone and unearthing years of the news just by looking behind her big brown chair. Wandering up to bed with an armfull of paper I felt like a hunter. I caught clues of my prey on every surface and in every corner, tea, still warm, her ciggarettes by the phone, socks sprawled across a chair, all the magazines and journals she read in little bunches behind and on top of everything that they could be behind or on top of.

I heard her sigh from the bath. I could see her stretching her legs over the edges and shooting little spouts of water into the air. I could see her ciggarette smoking away in its ashtray and the half read article with it's wet little handprint spreading slowly across the paper. I fell asleep with the smell of her bath and cheap ciggarettes in the air.