Soft bristles against the rug,

Rocky paws slowly stretching out to meet the musty wood, coated with short lines of dust that sandals have kicked up from the crags when their owner takes breaks from thoughtless study.

He looks up from his book as she bends her head around, her nose twitching and growing ever moist with an insatiable lust for the unattainable, His eyes widen slightly as his brows, furrowed from years of following the light of curiosity to the quiet temple where he found no holy consciousness, but only his own weak murmurs, barely more than silent, charge the animal with inquiry

She answers with a crude, almost inexplicable groan, deep from her core, seasoned with obedience that has seen in its many years no reciprocal act, not but once, when their eyes first met, rather she has brushed against the cold cheek of ignorance on many an occasion, which she, to preserve what she knew to be dignity, slowly replaced with the tile floor of the bathroom.

“Unfair,” they call it, that neither would his maturity allow him to care for her, nor would her pragmatic selflessness outlive the childish spirit that dwelled in him for so long, only to perish in the internal coup that made him lament where he had erred so foully – he would come back in years equal to the times he had shed his faith in God and mankind, but by then her spirit would be broken and the paragon of his faith would find himself lost in the field of doubt, finding it overgrown with emptiness after the nourishment of enlightenment and tears.

I do not give it that title; rather I call it nature, though perhaps that entity truly does carry with it the silver medal of betrayal; nature drove them apart, him to a more focused state of affection, and her to a more depressing state of dementia; nature cast shadows on their purity, repeatedly ruining his trust and constantly decaying her self-respect.

Perhaps it was nature, then, that drove her the thirteen miles to the school of the grotesque, sirens all along the way drawing her to the sweaty adolescent, hedonism, that grows from the child, disappointment. She pressed her face against the cold window as she looked out into the field, where a man was wandering alone; she stared, and blinked occasionally, that her eyes might be fresh, that she might serve as the man’s guide should he fall to his knees and confess foolishness, ignorance, cruelty; but he never did. She neared the end of the road, but the scene remained stagnant as the storms of warm October, when the minutes turn to hours, which bubble into a murky pool, a night of loneliness; at the end of her trek there was a moldy carpet where she sat and licked herself until she found untouched, virgin climax as the mildew crept into her lungs through her increasingly deep breaths. Her legs stretched out further and slipped off the carpet onto the dusty floor; her bones hardened as she created from emptiness a satisfaction that she knew at once to be rotten at its core. She exhaled violently, licked her lips, making a sound that bore a likeness to the last pound of sewage falling into a misshapen, rusted pipe, and looked up at him in a blank stare; all emotion was gone from the thesis that men had for years called love.

He once thought himself to be living in hiatus, but he saw now the black truth, shrouded in faithlessness: Love is dead. Nay, it had never lived.