Maggie was curled into herself, with her arms bent and curled so her hands tucked under her chin. She looked like a an invalid in a coma, in a profound and permanent sleep. Tony stood and watched her. He was trying to make snese of evertthing. Two days ago they where a middle aged couple celebrating a their pregnancy on holiday and exploring the city almost like teenagers. And now he was trying to figure out where all the chaos came from. He did not know how to deal with it, and everytime he looked at his wife something inside him was broken. He flet guilty and enraged anbut mostly jealous. And it was the jealousy that really infected him. She had to know what happened. She knoew. She must know. You cant get raped like that and not know. She must be hiding something from him. Maybe she was. Maybe she was doing it because she did not want to offend his brittle ego. Maybe she was hidding what happened because she enjoyed it.
At that moment a sash of light crossed Maggies face and the sweeping light illuminated her fine features, her skin looked milky white, the rose draw from it entirely by the contrast of the darkness, her lips alone carried proof of life, a lilac tint in the dim glow was proof she was alive. Tony remembered how her paleness attracted him when they first met, her white skin and electric eyes. The reminders of Maggie, the memory of her drew Tonys thoughts away from the magnestic pit of conciet and the endless negative spiralling, the thoughts of her took him into the moments of isolated joy that come with a long term companion, a well of warm reminders of afftection and love. The cool light from the moon, flicked over Maggies face briefly, then like a wisp it was gone. And the flat darkness of the surroundig ward balanced the night again. Tonys thinking had been arrested and in the void between now and the next thought he loved Maggie, and then he frowned.
Tony looked around toward the window and saw the curtain flick again, craking open briefly with calm light. The window was open. Tony nodded to himself assuring with certainty that it was not open earlier. Maggie must have done that. She must have got up crossed to the window and opened it. She absolutely detested air conditioning. She compared it to smiming the luke warm water of the children's pool at a public swiming bath. Maggie hated public pools too. She must have done this, while he was in the corridor watching the maddness unfold, she opened the window. But where had she been when he came in afterwards? It just did not make sense. Tony approached the window and reached for the aluminium handle.
"No. Don't" said Maggie.
Tony was started and quickly turned aroung to face her.
"Oh god" he said, "you're awake"
But she wasn't.
A cold wind made Tonys skin crawl. His hairs all stood on end. Tony looked into the darkend ward but it was empty. He looked again at his wife. Her slight frame expanded and contracted with a slow steady rythm. Her breath was deep and regular. Tony listened to her breathing, he was envious. Tony smiled a little. Maggie was breathing heavily, almost snoring. He once mentioned it to her and she was mortified, he teased her about it, and she really was embarassed at the idea. She blatantly denied it and accused him of lying. But he wasn't. Here she was snoring. Purring. Perhaps purring was a nicer way to present that facts. The more her listed to her, the more her sound resembled a soft grumble, a surpressed gargeling, it was no more an affectionate feline sound but rather a cannine growl, and soft rolling growl, like a dog dreaming. He quietly approached her to listen closely. The more Tony looked at Maggie the more he realised that he hated her.
The awareness was suddenly upon him, and he quickly abandoned the thought. He pushed it away. But it had been thought. It was now a manifest member of his ego and even though Tony had pushed the idea from his mind it had occured, and so it was now a residual memory, one of those phantoms that visit the mind moments before sleep in the silence of the ended day, and in the quiet they wait to be thought again, and when that thing is thought is grows a little. Those moments before sleep incubate things that should not be thought, and sometimes those are the tunes that breech the divide and cross into the subconsious, and those are definitely the things that should not be taken into the speechless realm of sleep, and left in the shutterless dark to fester. Tony shook his head almost as if he could shake his mind free of it, like a pet after a bath flinging water away in a great centrifugal effort.