Mopping

Mopping

* now with Passion Perspiration (TM)

Naked, she crawls along the baseboard pushing her bucket ahead of her. She dips her soapy rag and slops it against the woodwork. It is always in the oily heat of the dark night when she does this.
She has risen from their bed, given up the hope of cooling off. If they had an air conditioner, their woodwork might stay dusty all year round. She does not light the lights because she thinks it is cooler in the dark. And besides, she knows where the dirt is. She works her way like a mole down the hall and around the edges of the rooms.
Naked, he lies awake in the mean heat. Their little fan spins false promises into the half- empty bed. He hears her slow scoot, slow swish. "This bed is an oven. I'll die here," he tells himself.
He flips the pillow, it stays cool for eight seconds and then it tries to smother him again. The neighbors' air conditioner buzzes, reminding him he is outside the cool place, shut out on the noisy side of the quiet place. He watches the curtain. A breeze he's been praying for arrives but it is too weak to slip under the hem of the gauzy cloth. "I will die here," he moans.
She is silent, merging with the water and staying low to the ground beneath the heat that hangs higher in the air. Her nakedness and the damp parquet beneath her knees please her. Now and then she presses her hot face to the cool plaster and rests there.
His head is full of hornets and he thinks of martyrs who were boiled. That death seems a quick mercy, unlike his parboiled suffering. His eyes burn like smudges in their sockets and his skeleton is strung, not of bone, but of wire hangers; his flesh a tangle of withered balloons. "I'll die," he mutters.
He curses and tosses himself onto his stomach, kicks the sheet aside and moans. Scoot, scoot, swish, swish. She is halfway down the blind hallway. He can smell her - sweat and heat and lemony suds. Deep inside his loins, that certain switch trips. Provoked, his blood begins its primal crawl. Now, he rises.
He feels her breathing in the hot gloom. Her silhouette floats through the dark kitchen. The dirty water pounds down the drain and the clean water falls into the bucket. From the shadow, she steps down the passageway and sinks again to her knees, buries her arms in the bucket and squeezes out the wet rag.
She is a lovely naked puddle, sweating into the mopping pail and squish squishing the soppy rag. Her breasts swing over the water and her strong arm pulls up the rag and swats the boards.