Echo

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The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life ... it had managed to murmur, 'Pathos, piety, courage-they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.'

-E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

O Rose, thou art sick!

 The invisible worm

 That flies in the night,

 In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

 Of crimson joy:

 And his dark secret love

 Does thy life destroy.

 -William Blake (1757-1827)

*1*

It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant. She sniffed it on the air one warm June evening as she parked her car in her garage, but she assumed it came from her neighbours' dustbin on the other side of the low wall that divided the properties, and did nothing about it. The next morning the smell of decay eddied out from inside when she putted open the garage doors, and curiosity led her to poke among the stack of boxes at the back after she had reversed her car on to the driveway. Certainly, she didn't expect to find a corpse. If she expected anything, it was that someone had abandoned their rubbish in there, and it shocked her badly to find a dead man huddled on sheets of flattened cardboard in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.

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