The label-maker IV

When Doris found Bob dead at his desk, she was thirty-five, and she had not said a word to him for sixty-seven days.

It was a smell that reminded her of fish broth forgotten in a hot summer room, and it was this smell that told her, even before she saw his head slumbered in a mountain of yellow tags. Her hand hovered, trembled, then gingerly traced his rubbery skin from the roughness of his elbow, along a vein swampy green, and hesitantly down to his wrist. Her acid stomach rose in her throat, but she was rooted to the spot by the supernatural coldness of his flesh – colder than an empty bed through the night, colder than her feet early in the morning. When she dared to look, his face was drawn in an infinite circle with encrusted tears, white as hotel sheets, his eyes unseeing. She shuddered, uncontrollably tightened her skin. A thousand numbing aches spread out from the centre of her own encrusted plastic back, her temples thumped, and her insides crumpled in a heap.

Traversing the line separating his wrist from his palm, Doris dipped her hand into Bob's, and shaking, retrieved from it that which kept him company for the last sixty- seven days. The label-maker weighed heavily in her hands, and a yellow strip hung from it, limp, but not forgiving:


Still lov, still lov, Doris whispered, though she could hardly breathe. What is that? Still lov, what is that? She ransacked the apartment before stumbling out into the street. She ran frantic and flailing, one hand pulling and tugging at her shirt. She grabbed a man on a nearby park bench, and with her other hand ripped off her sweat-soaked shirt. She pleaded with him with wild eyes, shoved the camera into his hands, spun around and waited as his hesitant flash illuminated her back over and over.

When she looked at the camera's display screen, she could barely make out Bob’s label-thoughts, criss-crossing her ribboned skin, twisting, matting, turning, and her coarse voice scratched painfully as she read out his words:

STILL LOVED BY BOB

STILL LOVED BY BOB

STILL LOVED IF YOU TURN TO FACE THE WALL

STILL LOVED IF YOU BREATHE OUT OF TIME

BREATHE OUT OF PLACE

FLY BLINDLY, RECKLESSLY,

IF YOU REFUSE TO ROLL IN HOT GRASS

IF YOU STOP RESTING, SOARING IN ME

STILL LOVED IF YOU CLIMB DOWN,

FALL, TUMBLE, SLIDE BY

STILL LOVED BY BOB, BOB, AND BOB

STILL LOVED IF YOU STOP STAMPING YOUR FEET WITH MINE