Chapter One

Someting clicked and this just arrived. It's a short chapter, the first chapter in a novel I am working on, yet unnamed.
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The colours were never more obvious than when they were gone. The memory was vivid. Too vivid. Like the aftertaste of something that was sweeter than the original taste.

Dan opened his eyes and spent a long, slow moment studying the pattern of the ceiling, those little dabs and ridges of plaster or whatever that Dan had never figured out how they made. Probably something elegantly simple, like the way a blender works.

Then he inhaled. He inhaled and for the moment was lost in a memory, as the eddies of night blooming jasmine that had slipped in through the window from the street outside now filled his nostrils, his lungs, his heart. With a great heaviness.

She wasn’t there. The scent told him that. The coolness of the bed. The angle of the mattress. The ache in his being.

She hadn’t been there for days. Maybe weeks. It was late and he was tired and he had lost track of the calendar’s relentless march. If this was the 17th, she had been gone a week. But was it the 17th? If it was after midnight and yesterday was the 17th, she had been gone 8 days. Was it the 18th?

Eight long bastard days with long bastard nights when the coolness of the bed and the scent of the night blooming jasmine had mutilated Dan’s soul.

He closed his eyes and wept.
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