Harold lay on the bed. Warm rays of sunlight pierced the blinds and settled across his half-naked chest. Carol came in. No knock. Just long legs that somehow made the floor beneath them sing.

Harold let his head fall to one side and studied her. Her curvy body, like a violin. She had lips men would go to war for. Resting against each other, slightly parted. As if all they had to do was whisper sensually into your ear: feminine, feminine, feminine...

Lips that could make your eyes roll back while they wrapped themselves around you and robbed you of every last drop of passion. Emerald-green eyes that could pierce straight through your innermost self if they wanted to. Eyes with a license to steal your breath.

Carol headed for the bed. Harold’s eyes remained fixed on her. She greeted him with her usual words. He closed his eyes and gave a silent nod downward. She placed her thighs against the side of the bed. Slowly, she let the blanket slide from his lightly clothed body. She bent down slightly, pressed her forearm against his hip, then shoved him upward with one practiced movement until he was suddenly lying on his side.

Her emerald-green eyes looked down at Harold’s shit-covered asshole.

Supporting his body with her left arm, she wiped his ass clean with her right hand. It took several layers of paper. Finally, she cleaned between his cheeks with a washcloth. Then she pulled Harold’s navy-blue pajama bottoms back up and covered him again with the white blanket.

There was nothing but white bed linen in the entire nursing home. Only the wool blankets were different. They were all light gray and bore the name *Sonnenhof*. Carol’s hands were covered by a pair of thin rubber gloves. Her red-painted fingernails struggled to show through.

The nursing staff always had a small trolley with them. On top was a shelf for fresh towels and washcloths. Underneath was a basin for the same things once they had been used. Two garbage bags hung from the side. One for diapers and shit, the other for rubber gloves and miscellaneous waste.

Harold didn’t say a word throughout the whole performance. All he had inside him were the same old memories. The same old dead thoughts, over and over again. The sight of the nursing staff briefly pulled him out of his endless brooding.

Harold had once been a financial adviser. Mentally, he was still reasonably sharp, and he was still good at doing arithmetic in his head.

**“I’m in room twelve. She always wipes my ass first. I lie by the window. Mr. Aichinger, the one by the door, always gets washed after me. Two dirty asses per room. I’m asshole number twenty-three.”**

Going through his numbers every day gave him a small sense of purpose. After his stroke, he had only been able to walk short distances with a walker. After his last fall, even that was over. The latest hip operation had permanently confined him to bed.

The last time he hadn’t shit himself was already a while ago. Autumn three years earlier, to be precise.

The last time anyone had sucked his cock was another decade before that. It had been his wife, Maria, after a drinking session with the neighbors.

She had a nice body and an ass that was always elegantly dressed, a pretty mouth. She knew exactly which shade of lipstick suited her best.

How many times had that coral red wrapped itself around him...

He would have enjoyed it more if he had known it would be the last time. He had let himself get carried away too quickly, had neglected to linger longer in her ecstatic eyes.

Not long afterward, they removed her tits.

Six months later, she died of breast cancer.

After Maria’s diagnosis, Harold still had a good eight months in which he told her how much he loved her.

The cancer didn’t care.

It took everything with it.

Her breasts, her lips, her face, all their love, the old bench in the kitchen, her dog, the lawn mower.

His cholesterol finished the job.

And so he lay here now. The seasons peered through the window, unimpressed, watching with bored indifference as he stuck to the mattress.

Untouched.

Without tenderness.

A photograph of Maria lay out of sight in the top drawer. On bright days, he took it out for a few minutes before the melancholy overwhelmed him and he made it disappear beneath the puzzle books again.

His bones had long since begun to melt away, both hands numb with arthritis, yet a small fire still burned in his heart: playful fantasies, inappropriate desires, utopian longings.

The daily sight of the female nursing staff made the room crackle every day.

A torturous crackle that led nowhere.

Carol turned to Harold’s roommate. She dealt with him just as methodically as she did with everyone else. The *Good morning, Mr. Müller/Maier* sounded the same in every room. Like prerecorded announcements on a tram.

To her, it was a job like any other.

Driving in screws.

Slaughtering calves.

Sorting lemons on a conveyor belt.

Carol’s ass was seductively tilted forward as she worked the washcloth across Mr. Aichinger’s considerably less impressive one. Her buttocks pressed against her white uniform. Her rounded halves pulled even the smallest wrinkles from the fabric.

A snow-white full moon.

Forever beyond mankind’s reach.

A faint rape fantasy flickered through Harold’s mind.

He stretched out his hand, reached for the little cup of pills, and washed them down with a gulp of passion-fruit juice.

The pills pushed his suffering into the second row and his drowsiness into the first.

Carol wheeled herself and her trolley out of the room, leaving stale emptiness behind.

There was hardly anything personal on the walls. Just some furniture and a few square meters of sterile space.

A shoebox full of shit had more charm than these four walls.

Mr. Aichinger’s urine bag, hanging from the side of his bed, glowed toward the door.

Nathalie came in. She was responsible for changing the bed linen. In the afternoons, she also served cake and coffee at the bedside.

She was Harold’s favorite, and sometimes he imagined that she actually liked her job.

And perhaps even him.

He always went through the same routine with her.

“When Mr. Aichinger dies, you can move in with me. We can eat pudding all day.”

Nathalie improvised her replies.

“I wish I wasn’t married. We’d probably have a lot of fun together,” was today’s.

Another time she had said:

“Pudding? That sounds like a pretty boring dessert.”

Paired with a challenging look, that one had been Harold’s favorite so far.

The joke had worn somewhat thin over the years and had already outlived two roommates, but Nathalie’s smile was still as good as new.

If he narrowed his eyes a little and let her outline blur, she almost looked like Maria.

Nathalie’s hair was a little lighter, ash-blond rather than copper-brown. Otherwise, she was almost her double.

The same cheekbones.

The same curious doe eyes.

Their little jokes reminded Harold of moments from the past.

So many things reminded him of something.