She Who Was No More by Pierre Boileau

with a touch of melancholy. There it was. It was coming now—the word. It was forming, deep down, and slowly rising to the surface. Soon it would be there. Why should that suddenly seem menacing?
    Fly .
    A fly. Yes it was a fly, a fly crawling across the ceiling. And this dark splodge on his right was the cupboard. Bit by bit everything was starting again. In cold and silence… I feel round me. A tiled floor. I’m cold. I’m lying down. I’m Fernand Ravinel… And there’s a letter on the table…
    Better not go into that. Don’t ask questions, don’t try to find out. Hold on to oblivion. So long as you do, you won’t care. That’s the important thing: not to care. But it’s hard, it’s exhausting… Don’t think about it. Just try your limbs to see if they work.
    They did. The muscles obeyed him. His arm moved, his hand was capable of grasping. His eyes fell on things and knewthem. His brain found words to call them by. He could stand… But on the table—That bit of paper and that envelope—he mustn’t see them, he mustn’t find words for them. They were too dangerous, much too dangerous.
    He must turn his back on them. He lurched to the front door, went out, and slammed it behind him. There! That was better. He locked the door. Better still. No one could say now what was behind it. He mustn’t know. He mustn’t ever see that letter again, or anything might happen. The words might leave the page and form themselves into fantastic threatening shapes.
    Ravinel was almost at the end of the street before he looked back. The house seemed inhabited, as he’d left the lights on. Often, when he came home of an evening, he would see Mireille’s shadow as she crossed behind one of the slatted shutters. But he was too far off now. Even if she passed, he wouldn’t be able to see her. He walked to the station. He was bareheaded. In the refreshment room he drank two glasses of beer. Victor, the waiter, was busy at the bar; otherwise he’d have been only too ready for a chat. As it was, he merely gave Ravinel an occasional wink or a smile.
    How could cold beer burn your throat like spirits? Ought he to take to flight? What would be the use? Another mauve envelope might come, this one addressed to the police inspector, reporting the crime. Yes, Mireille might lodge a complaint for having been killed! Come on! None of that! Those thoughts were forbidden.
    Quite a crowd of people on the station platform. The colored lights were painful. The red signal light was too red, the green one sickeningly sweet. The bookstall smelt of fresh ink. In thetrain, the people exuded an odor of game and the carriages smelt like those of the underground.
    It had to finish like this. Sooner or later he had been bound to discover what was concealed from other beings—that there was no real distinction between the living and the dead. It’s only because of the coarseness of our perception that we imagine the dead elsewhere, in some other world. There isn’t any other world. Not a bit of it. The dead are with us here, mixed up in our lives and meddling with them. Remember to turn the gas off when you’ve finished with the oven … They speak to us with shadowy mouths; they write with hands of smoke. Ordinary people, of course, don’t notice. They’re too preoccupied with their own affairs. To perceive these things you’ve got to have been incompletely born and thus only half involved in this noisy, colorful, flamboyant world…
    Yes, he was beginning to understand. That letter was the first step in a process of initiation. Why should he be so frightened about it?
    ‘Tickets, please!’
    The ticket collector was a stout, florid man with two rolls of fat at the back of his neck. Many of the passengers were standing, and he brushed past them impatiently. Little did he know that he was at the same time pushing his way through a host of shadows. It wouldn’t be long, no doubt, before Mireille was among them. Her letter had been written to