fleeting.

[beatnikpaperbag]

In the semi-darkness of that winter evening, her eyes were blurred. And then as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the senses, the ears, the touch, the palate, all movements of the body, all its external ways of communicating with the exterior, she suddenly felt a little deaf, a little blind, a little paralyzed; as if life, in coiling upon itself into a smaller, slower inward rhythm, were thinning her blood.

She shivered, with the same tremor as the leaves, feeling for the first time some small withered leaves of her being detaching themselves.