Drowned by Therese Bohman

at the station. I read the placards advertising the evening papers on the wall of the closed newsstand, the tips and puzzles in the magazines: holiday buffet menu, crochet patterns, free crossword pullout. When Gabriel finally arrives he seems to be totally unaware that he is late.
    “Oh no, have you been waiting?” he says, sounding surprised.
    “We did say twenty past.”
    “Sorry, I thought we said twenty to.”
    “It’s fine.”
    He gives me a hug, pulling me close and holding me tight. I bury my face in his scarf and inhale his smell, it’s the same smell as in the summer. It is sweet, almost too sweet, bordering on nauseating, but I like it, it makes me feel safe. It’s as if it makes the world shrink to the small area around him pervaded by that smell. I don’t want to let go of him. He is wearing a dark coat that looks new and expensive, it suits him. I tell him, he smiles and says I’m lovely.
    We don’t say anything in the car. The landscape is completely different now, the fields that were yellow last summer are black, torn up, they look wounded, as if someone has raked them with nails as long as talons. One field is flooded after all the rain we have had during the fall, it has turned into a small lake with two swans gliding around like glowing patches of white. It is almost impossible to make out a horizon, land and sky merge into a gray mist. It’s warm in the car, foggy with condensation.
    “How’s your assignment going?” asks Gabriel.
    “What?”
    “Rossetti?”
    “Oh … I’ve hardly done any work on it at all. What about your book?”
    “It’s finished.”
    I look at him.
    “I finished it at the end of September.”
    “Right … and were your publishers happy with it?”
    He gives a small smile.
    “They love it. They’re going to try to get it out pretty quickly, by the spring.”
    “Wow. Congratulations.”
    He nods absentmindedly, his index fingers drumming on the wheel as he increases the speed of the windshield wipers, the rain is coming down more heavily now.
    This is not the colorful fall Stella talked about when we were at the palace, not the picture-postcard, crisp October fall with high, clear air and vivid colors she thought I should come back for, that fall has been and gone. This is late fall, raw and rainy. I can no longer smell the rotting leaves, it is no longer possible to tell that it was once summer. The entire landscape is in a state of torpor, it has resigned itself, let go. No fall colors, only brown and gray, no leaves left on the trees, they are lying on the ground now, sodden in the puddles, crushed, a mush of fallen leaves, covering the lawn. I know you’re supposed to rake them up, even if I can’t remember why. Is it because the grass can’t get any air if you don’t? Or light? I think theleaves can keep the grass warm this winter, perhaps it might be happy under there, nice and cozy beneath its blanket of leaves.
    The garden is in the process of decay. The sunflowers look like scarecrows now that they have gone over, their seed heads black and wet, their leaves straggling and shriveled. I pull on Stella’s Wellington boots that are in the back porch and take a walk around the garden, noticing the tomatoes that ripened but were never picked, their split skins exposing the dried flesh, rhubarb with leaves as big as umbrellas, the stalks so thick they are presumably inedible. They taste best before they get too big, as far as I remember, then they become bitter, woody. The pods of the sugar snap peas are swollen and lumpy, distorted, also too big for anyone but the worms to eat. Only the parsley is still green, glowing amid all the brown and gray, tiny drops of water have collected in its curly leaves. I break off a piece and push it in my mouth, it has the harsh taste of iron. A few sparse marigolds are still flowering stoically in the borders.
    In the greenhouse most of the plants are dead. Those that are still alive are overgrown, they should