Elbow Room

The water is scalding hot. It pours in a thick linear transparent line in the empty plastic bucket — resonating around the tiled bathroom walls like drum rolls. She sits in the cold on the silver steel settee, naked. Her body hunched and gathered in her arms, swaying back and forth — waiting. She watches the steam rise like smoke from a funeral pyre, divine and purifying, disappearing into the ceiling.

Slowly, very slowly, she puts both her feet into the bucket. The warmth attacks her toes, feet, spreading to her legs up to her cold bony knees. As she does that, the water spills over from the bucket onto the floor, overwhelmed. Bones in her thin legs crackle like cold logs in the fire. She puts her hands and arms in next. She finds a therapeutic relief in the boiling hot water that almost burns her skin. It feels like she could go to sleep under that effect. Stay here forever. The band that holds her hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, she loosens with a wet hand. As the warmth reaches up to her thighs and back and neck and face she feels renewed. The warmth seeps into her very being, getting the blood frozen in her veins moving again. Hot red thick liquid. She can feel it travelling in her body like tiny fishes. All her troubles seem to melt for a while. There she sits, hanging suspended in mid-air in space-time continuum.

Now that her body has adjusted to the hot water, the heat that had embraced her body like love begins to abandon her limbs. She takes her arms and legs out of the bucket and stands up, her teeth clattering against each other. Her hands are wrinkled and pink. Water drips like greed from her body. She stands there contracting back the cold slowly. The wind jabs at her naked soggy body as she stands shivering... defending herself with a dry towel.