Cast Iron

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It smells of animal here. Dead animal. Something that has been hung to ripen before cooking. Hundreds of years of fermenting grapes have suffused the earth with odours of yeast and carbonic gas, stale now, sour, a memory retained only in the soil and the sandstone and the rafters. Like all the forgotten lives that have passed through this place, in sunlight and in darkness.

It is dark now and another life has passed.

Dust hangs in the pale light that angles through the open door, raised by the act of pulling her dead body from dark concealment to the wash of cold, colourless moonlight that bathes a face once beautiful and animated by youth. A face made ugly now by the blood that has dried in her golden hair, on her porcelain cheek, a tiny river of it following the contour from her temple to her ear. By the eyes that stare in unnatural stillness into the deep shadow that hangs overhead like a shroud. Blue eyes, lit once by the light of life, turned milky and opaque by death.

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