Eyeshadow, applied when the eyelids were still warm, gleamed bronze in the fluorescents of the cooler, two shining pennies. The bags of her eyes were two jellied mounds decorated with veins in the pattern of lightning bolts. Her skin was leathery, creased, and holding its shape well thanks to the decades of sun damage. Her lips were stained on the left corner with the permanent tar marks of Marlboro Lite 100s. She looked no different in recent death than in late life, though I could never mistake her for sleeping. The heat of her was gone, forever, and the blood-awareness of her presence was now a lost signal. All our lives, my head would turn unconsciously as she stepped into a room, but now there was no heat to guide my senses.
Compelled by TV programming to reach out and touch her, gently, on the edge of her jawline just below her cheekbone, my hand raised submissively for the sustained shot before a commercial break. But as my hand neared, an intense revulsion rocketed into my fingertips from my brain stem, and I drew my hand back. Touching her face without the warmth underneath was an impossibility.