Exiting.

I sat on a chaise longue in a lady's boudoir today. The curtains were drawn, and the hands of the clock were stopped at 11.15; in that room it is forever going to be 11.15 if you believe in eternity which I do. And it's such a depressing thought, forever stuck at 11.15 with only the question AM or PM to ask, and to be tortured with no conclusive answer for ever and ever, amen.

The room smelled of lavender and antiseptic. The lady's teeth sat in a glass and they looked far too big for the puckered little mouth that had became lost in the powdered, wrinkled  face whose jowls were starting to sag. I didn't know her first name, so as I sat alone looking at her I imagined her as a Desdemona or an Esmerelda, certainly nothing from the Old Testament. A name that would suggest flowing chiffon rather than flanelette.

At last the doctor arrived and fussed around with needles and thermometers, a doctor who no-one would trust with the living. Eventually he declared the lady to be dead, deceased, defunct, words all beginning with a deathly D, words I had already applied as I sat keeping watch over her on her flowery, lumpy chaise longue surrounded by the rising vapours of death, and entertained by her last trump, her post mortem farts.