Toilet Roll

It was one wispy sheet draped across the chrome arc

of the paper holder, its inner cardboard roll disappeared,

and had been hung deliberately but without explanation

just before she too was no more. This is only a bathroom

where domestic dramas rarely unfold in the way the rest

of the roll had been unfurled – I have to guess - yet leaving

that page behind delivered a message if I was able to read

along the line. Sitting there, it became another dilemma.

Perhaps it had been in the decision to treat ourselves: the

quilt of its texture an elaboration we had not needed in our

time before this, and on reflection the money could have

been better spent on a magazine with dull stories about the

sudden disasters in other people’s lives, or on those maps

in the charity shop about places nearby we hadn’t visited.