Witness

The water in the blue cup did not keep its promise.  On his lips, it was wet but not refreshing. Backwash.  A viscous rainbow, the barely visible stain was spreading out on the surface of everything.  Cloaks and veils, wool and silk.  Shades he pulled up over us like the extra blanket.  

The bitterness had dissipated.  The toxins were lost in the deluge, his saliva rolling off the walls of his mouth--his ground down teeth--in waves of instinctual spit, one last effort to expel the poison.  There were shivers.  There was a glistening on his skin.  Something essential inside him was condensing on his body's surface, preparing to rise into the shadows above the bed.

Night was coming.  The air was thickening.  There was a tightness that he had not expected, a kind of quicksand made of deepening greys and twilight blues.   It felt as if the lozenge had dissolved.  Along with his tongue, his skull, his voice.  First there was a hum, then a whussshh, then there was only the silence; it was devouring everything.  His hand was stiffening in mine.  Laying on top of him, I could feel him begin to cool.