Kate Buckley

My eyes lie flat in my skull, darkened, bruised lashes whip-stitched to swollen lids – sleep has once again been elusive. My organs weigh more than they did the day before, swollen with unhappiness, gorged on regret: tiny fists in my stomach pummeling the hanging ball of my heart.

I had a fascination with your dresses — the greens, brocades, the belted shapes which spoke of you more poignantly than the photos in their careful frames. Your shoes were their own country, the heels, satins, the inexplicable mud — I scraped them with small fingernails, marveling at the gorgeous debris, wishing I had a microscope. I searched your handbags, examined them for signs, evidence — where you were going, where you had been: tickets, lipstick, inked hieroglyphics, a broken comb. I even smelled your stockings, sniffing at the crotches like a dog, frantic for any trace of you, my eyes raking their length, wondering at ladders, searching for clues. My father came upon me once, cross-legged on the floor, his sad smile telling me more than any detection — he took my hand, and closed the door.

Stepping over the stones of my mother, chicken bones, straw, the cellar in which the man was found, that man my grandfather the day the sharecroppers left town, their son shot dead — the thing whiskey’ll do to a man. The woman who waited under the house at night, counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves, walking bare-boned lanes, toes buried beneath blackened leaves — no cause for worry if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row. Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind. I tell you these things so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear, not think I do not know what makes a life, what makes people do the things they do. I know my fears — I’ve named them, counted them out one by one like tarot cards, voodoo dolls: birth, death, poverty, obscurity, that you will leave me, or I will leave you.

He crawls through the cracks of my stone foundation, sly and sleek as I tempt him with food. He stays out of habit; I cook out of love for things that move. We grow accustomed to each other’s trails and smells, the skins we’ve shed along the long, long road of rubbing each other smooth. Till all the skins we’ve shed lie sparkling like so many stones in this desert land. I scoop him up in my hand and eat him.