Bamboo Silk by Rosaleen Lynch

Pillow talk turns to silk; real or faux. In winter’s lowlight, smoke rises from the bedside ashtray, as the hotel window keeps the lunchtime city at bay. She tells him, real silk shimmers, warms in the hand. A shadow of cloud darkens the room’s margins, where earlier they’d cast-off their clothes. You can check its genuine, he says, if it’s the real thing. She takes the ‘ring test’ to see how easily material glides through, without getting caught. He does a ‘burn test’, lights a match, lets the flame catch the edge, breathes the smoke, waits for the singed-hair smell, for falling ash to crumble in his hand and how, when the flame’s taken away, it no longer burns. His nostrils flare soot-black, like he’s spent a hellish afternoon on the Northern Line, rather than wrapped in silk-white sheets. It’s real, he says. As real, she nods, as the London rush hour, that will take them home this evening, on their separate ways.

She imagines silkworms, far from this cold city-life, feasting on white mulberry leaves, spinning protective cocoons, ending up, apropos of nothing, stabbed or boiled alive for thread. Unless they’re allowed to metamorphise, to emerge as moths, to discard damaged dwellings, so broken strands can be spun to join again into something new. But there’s still cruelty, she says, that you won’t find with bamboo silk.

The sheet is scarred with ash and something hits the window glass. Maybe a moth or a leaf? Before she can tell, it’s gone in a flurry of snow.

Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer in London with work selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net and is currently exploring the power of stories to promote social change.