Beatrice woke up, unsure of what to do. Felix’s body lay rotting in the corner, and she found herself stifling her gag reflex, and then getting mad at herself. This hadn’t been a person, had it? He had been a machine, using her, robbing her of her own humanity. He had fed on her. Still, she went over to him, and picked up his bloody body, moving it to the one chair in the room.
Then she sat at the edge of the bed, and stared at him. She adjusted his hands. She pushed his head backwards, but it just rolled against his back, like a sack of quarters.
Taking money from his pockets, she went shopping for food, and brought it back. She made two sandwiches, and placed one on his lap, like an offering to a god of old. After eating her sandwich, she sighed. He wasn’t going to eat his, was he. She let it stay there, and napped. When she woke up, she took his sandwich and ate it.
This routine went on for weeks. Over time, she cleaned off the blood, and dressed him up in various clothes. She would talk to him, about anything at all. The little boys (Ethan and Ben) that she had run into at the market. A new building was going up on the west part of town, and many were upset (the architecture was a more modern style, from some eastern continent that she had never heard of). She would walk around town, shop, eat, and then talk to Felix.
One especially cold night, she woke up and, saying nothing to anyone at all, took his motionless body, laid it down in the bed, and then pressed her back into his still chest. She fell asleep like that, cradled in his dead arms.
ALCOVA. 