She walks in beauty like the night

She comes back late, Chloe, I'm violently awakened by her razor silhouette fixed in the artificial back light from the doorway. She stands there like a marble statue for the smallest part of an eternity before soundlessly stepping out of her wrinkled dress, leaving it behind in a branded blood pool on the naked floor.

"It's so dark" she whispers as she climbs into bed, touches down softly like a butterfly behind me and puts her warm little doll hand between my thighs. I would stop a waterfall before going back to sleep, memories of other nights like these are keeping me amplified and wide awake in the deafening silence. She's as close as Henry used to be and the microscopic twitches from her piano fingers are slowly making me wet.

"I dreamed about fireflies" she says in the morning, "or maybe they were stars". She's gone now, I answered with a lie just to keep her smiling.