She lies on her back billowing halos that scatter to wisps in the ceiling fan’s wake. The impassive morning lends her torso an ethereal blue outline. Her lower half is wrapped in sheets, damp and acrid. Her face has been sanded smooth by the lightlessness. Headlights cut through the slits of the blinds, scan across the bare walls and catch on the liquor yellow skin of the man beside her in bed. The car travels on, disappearing the light. He stirs, stretching naked limbs like some skeletal cat. Balancing on an elbow, he reaches for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. Hunched over, his coughs are an S.O.S. spat from his mouth. He cradles the crushed pack of cigarettes like some precious thing.

“Are you also scared like me?” The woman speaks to no one. Her words are lost in the room filled with so much smoke. Overhead, the fan continues stirring, folding the heavy air into itself like cake batter.

Grunting shattered syllables, the woman’s sideways nudeness untangles from the sheets and slides out of bed. She pulls on her pants and the wrinkled white blouse she hadn’t bothered to unbutton the night before. She picks her coat off the ground; its shoulders are still damp from last night. She slings it over the back of the rooms’ single chair. Her fingers smell of cheap pilsner. In her pockets: Lighter, keys, wallet and some sort of powder, pooled at the bottom. In her coat pocket she makes a fist around two cold rectangles. One’s a phone, the other an empty case. She’s sure she smoked her last cigarette the night before, or she’s sure she gave it to the man now in bed. With blurry eyes she stares vacantly at the hollow space between the chair and the bed. More cars rumble down the street and throw their light into the room. Her shadow moves across the wall marking the passing moments. She looks back toward the bed where the hunched over man sits, still cradling the pack of cigarettes. On his lip a cigarette dangles, bent, unlighted.

His cheeks are a puffy cobweb of shallow, broken veins. His bulging stomach is out of place on his emaciated frame. Shadows hide the purple swelling around his right eye. Though she can’t see it, she knows it’s there. Yellow, purple palm prints color the rest his body like leopard spots.

As she moves toward him, he raises his chin away from the cigarettes and seems to notice her for the first time. He twists his lips into a smile that despite everything manages to be bashful, almost innocent. But he’s not, she thinks. Hasn’t he always looked like that?

She steals the cigarettes from his open palms. His smile extinguishes. He turns back to his hands. Empty. She doesn’t notice.

“I hurt everywhere.” He says, rotating his neck, rubbing a shoulder.

“You were bumping into things all night at the bar, and then at the gas station.” She answers like parrying. “I counted the dents in your shins after you fell asleep or passed out or something.”

“How many?”

“Of what?”

“Dents. What do you think?”

“Some. Too many, or really, not enough. I don’t know, the numbers weren’t adding up.”

He studies the cracks in the wall like the map of a foreign country. The largest fissure runs from floor to ceiling, a jagged road stretching on and on.

“I never used to have nightmares, you know? Just regular dreams—never really good or bad.” He pauses, chewing his thoughts. “Last night was the third in a row. Awful, just awful.”

The woman sits at the edge of the bed lazily rotating her lighter’s flint wheel.

“Tell me then. What happened?”

“I feel as though someone is holding a sword over my head.” He tries sucking the smoke through his dead cigarette. “How can you think of anything else when you feel like that?” He pinches the loose skin on his wrist and watches as it melts slowly back into his body, never quite recapturing its color. “Will it be just like a dream?”

They sit a few moments surrounded by smoke and silence.

“You make a coward of me.” She says in the dopey way of a chastised child. With her back to him, he can’t tell if she’s crying.

She slings her coat over her shoulders and slips on her shoes. She lights a cigarette, releasing a thin ribbon of smoke. He stares into the center of her shadow, at the point where it is most livid. The wall’s familiar stains return as she moves out of the light.

She places her hand on the doorknob and pauses. Turning, she looks the man over, weighing the shape she saw through the alcohol lens the night before. She draws out her wallet, opens it and produces three wrinkled bills: two singles and a five. She crumples and tosses the wad onto the desk beside the door. She unlatches the deadbolt.

“I’m no prostitute.” He says to the crack in the wall.

“For the cigarettes.” She says opening the door. A step over the threshold she pauses, and for a moment picks with her nail the rubbery green paint peeling from the doorjamb. He just sits, staring straight down that crooked avenue running the height of the wall; she pulls the door closed. The lock clicks. The small jolt is enough to terminate the ancient fan.