When she awoke it was still day. Sharp stillness. She heard the blood beat in her temples. Her body was blanched, it was dead. Her head lay hot and swollen above an inert body.
She shut her eyes. The day swathed her head in myriad light shawls. One by one the shawls withdrew, they were gone. She opened her eyes against black Nothingness. It raced into her eyes, it won her swollen head. But her body it could not touch. Her body like a knife-thrust lay, white and still, within the belly of night.
—I must get up. She tried to get up and could not. She lay in her warm water. Her body prevailed. The water was cold. It was dry. Her head scolded against her stricken body. Her body endured like a bar of steel. It was solid death in a melted world that was dying.
There were days and there were nights. There were nights and there were days. The world winked open, the world winked shut. Rain dribbled into her window: sunbeams deflected lay like gold dust against it. Below, in the houses, feet fell; voices rose, fell; shadows of human will writhed up the twisted stairs to her white room: no substance followed. She was alone: her blanched dead body and her boiling head. Beneath her a great Void in which the sounds of doors and feet and words, the rumble of a cart, angled about like little balls of celluloid in a great hollow caldron.
Day night day ... the world winked dimmer. Fanny’s form lay like a wave-washed beam on the edge of the sea. Color was long since washed. The water sucked at the meat and the juice of the wood. It was porous light, it was rotten before the ceaseless suck of the water of the sea. Her head was lower. It no longer boiled above her body.
Then Fanny shut her eyes: and her eyes were all of her head that was not like her body ... dim and porous and sucked.
“Is this what all was for?” said her eyes. “Have I gone through all this—all this—to die like a cat in a barn?”
She knew she was not to die.
“I am going to die. My life has been nonsense ... and now I am going to die.”
She knew she was not to die.