The Warmth That Stayed: She Could Not Be Left - by Diana Piner

The marriage ended without a slammed door. It only took the noise. What it left Mara was a concrete house that never fully dries, work that never asks for her voice, a small indoor pool she uses when the rooms get too wide—and Bruno, the heavy gray-muzzled dog who still sleeps against the back of her knees. She is thirty-eight and done performing. At night she stands in the water with her arms lifted, runoff tracing a body no one else is coming to see. Bruno watches from the tile. The first change is almost invisible: she stops closing the bathroom door. Heat returns to skin the pool has emptied. Breath finds the underside of a breast. Comfort thickens into hunger before she has assembled a reason to refuse it. What begins as leaning becomes a mouth. What begins as a mouth becomes the need for weight, for depth, for minutes in which leaving is no longer possible.