Hush.

The sun turns her body florid. It cauterizes the guilt that hemorrhages within her conscience. But a ruddy gold burns there on the surface as if her misdeeds leak through her pores. She tries to settle her face, lips set at a bow of indifference. She tries to pass by reflective object without looking, because she is afraid of a reflection she will not recognize, transparent and barren, lids half open, eyelashes swiped into quotation mark curves. Her clavicle settles just below her skin, a slant leading to the center of her chest, a place where her heart used to hover, quivering, palpitating, plump with blood, lifelines of arteries, an ornament of life; waiting, just waiting in its steady rhythm for someone to stir its monotonous beat.

She remembers being touched and in its absence her body aches for it. It is too easy to forget the rhapsody released from a thumb tracing the little slopes your knuckles make, in a hand placed over your own like the wing of a bird around its young.

*

She wonders who she would be in the time of Jane Eyre, how a man such as Rochester would see her in depth of night between the shadows of candlelight that tremble with invisible drafts. Her hair, freed from the woven thicket pulled severely from her face in the blanched light of day.

Her mane of hair, the color of wheat forgotten after harvest in the autumn, would fall across her cheek, shielding her left eye from having to look a man straight in the face. Men would favor woman like her in the after hours, the looseness of her dressing gown, a loose braid laid over her shoulder, strands floating near the curve of her neck that meets her shoulder, dancing there like the flame on dwindling candles. Night liberates the sumptuousness that has been contained in the crosshatching of her corset and the fastening of garters in the morning.

He would place a small violet in her hair, beside her ear, but does not speak of his trance she has left him in. The night wavers in the candlelight. She fears she will loose him in the day to the woman whose skin is softened by the lack of labor and elements of the earth, the lack of sleep in the night she has been exposed to.

She tells him he is not to be trusted.

She knows they have all turned their heads in her direction for a reason.