She watches you step

She watches you step across the tile, stockings and stockings soaking through. Your stocking feet leave their own grainy impressions as they buff and smear away bare foot prints and fingernail traces in the condensation. You step pointedly onto the older footprints; your feet slide. The coolness in the steamy room cools the skin in double worn overlapping holes in the stockings. You hide in your footsteps, thrown across the city. Recombined and reoriented by the tides and time they are dishonest and you leave them unexplained. They are hers, or hers, theirs. You cannot start guessing tonight. She saw them fall, press in and grind and the sea lap over them and she saw you struggle across the pavement, spiraling around apartments, courtyards, and parking lots. Footsteps to the window, standing tall on toes, to the kitchen table, pausing, stepping backward to the door, straight forward across the carpet, feet falling at vacuum seams, straight forward across the carpet and slowly into shadow soft stockings slide. You hide out beyond your footsteps, beside her, connected to her empty gaze, curling around door frames, table legs, feet stacked side on side your legs drawn upward.