The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids, we are so together, so concentrated. I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m the killer”—taking my wrist—he says, holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him, as if within some chamber of matedness, some dust I carry around me. Tonight, to breathe its Magellanic field is less painful, maybe because he is drinking a wine grown where I was born—fog, eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that, I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life. He says he loves me as the mother of our children, and new troupes of tears mount to the acrobat platforms of my ducts and do their burning leaps. Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a moment, I imagine a flurry of tears like a whirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.