it is old. not just old, but worn. fraying in some parts or just eroded in curiously small patches where velveteen tracks of material ran parallel, colored appropriately. the size of these patches is indeed bizarre. the mass of the creatures weighing it down should have yielded rather spacious pools of missing texture.

it is no longer vivid, though its colors were likely intended to be warm and sophisticated in their earthy timbres. maroon, olive green, a soft raw umber, and maybe some ochres. the pattern was a gaudy floral maze, and very large. rounded shapes mirrored and repeated, mocking obsessively or following others into that crease or that curve or that seam to disappear from the rude gaze of its occupants. decades ago, it may have been exciting. but a long life of hospitality has distressed the flowers to run dull and amorphous, almost homogeneous, varying grades of the same substance.

it is a compound. there was a large segment against one wall, a small one adjacent to it, and twin sister parts across the room at each corner. the larger one could house three or four. he used to sit on one of them, or on one side of the largest one. it was always the same spot but it’s been years, and she is probably the only one who remembers exactly where: where he would bend his knees to fill the wide clothed groove with his bony folded backside. sweat in it and allow his cologne to seep in from his neck to those dank murky fibers. pass gass into the bottom part, for sure, in his later years. when he lost it he maybe forgot just where he was sitting but she never did and she never will.

she still sits with his smells and breaths trapped in ratty knitted aisles, the groove of his withered body pressed into his spot, the lack of him and his strained cigarette laugh too dense to fit on it,

too dense to take a seat.