The faucet drips like a metronome for a song I can’t remember, rust grows on its mouth coarse, martian red, a corroded flora cultivating its own parasitic ecosystem. The air clings to skin like childhood fever, thick and warm, unyielding until the coral of your gums curdle to a charred violet. The mirror; fogged, spit-flecked, rimmed with a white crust like the lip of a dying wave stares at me with eyes that do not blink but flicker, waiting for me to look long enough that something else begins to look back. The floor is always cold, its chafed flesh damp with lesions, a slow seep of pus threading through the grout, sinking into the fissured spine of marble. Every step, an armistice with this unholy serenity, this stilness that coils around the ankles like vines, like veins, like fetal noose. There is rot in the corners of this room, black mold swelling like gardens of gangrenous tongues, the paint peeling away from the ceiling in ragged strips. And I sit bare thighs suctioned to imitation ivory, back hunched, not quite human in this pyric tungsten glow and I wonder if this room has learned me better than I have.