Slipping two five-dollar bills inside her casket. After, sitting in your car watching everyone filter out. Neither of us crying, not even when the radio cut and the sun peeked through the fog like an outstretched palm. Like the mole my father and I shared, growing back after he left — never bringing myself to remove it from my chin twice.
Watching you through the kitchen window crouching to your knees, holding a paper napkin, picking tomatoes for the birds. With a care you’d give anything soft and alive I wrapped a thread around my finger and pulled, imagined squeezing air from you until you were paper I could fold.
Early mornings kneading dough while Mom grew weaker. Using a paintbrush to spread butter, watching the sunset spread like oil and become more of itself. Later, digging for loose socks in a pile of your clothes, trying to match them all up.
Dry heaving into a wastebasket under the desk, yellow-white bile hiding numbers on dead receipts. Sitting in a parked car pushing beads onto string, making bracelets in a quiet machine. Going to the nail salon so someone would touch my hands.
Walking to the deli and ordering a coffee smaller than my palm, watching a cigarette bounce off the pavement like skipping stones in a lake. Seeing you through the laundromat window washing socks and a handkerchief. Walking past a missing persons sign of my face tacked to a post.
Sitting on a towel in the middle of the West with an open mouth. Waiting for you by the tilted clock, having just awoken in my bright red sheets. I thought I saw you, holding something close to an ornament, looking for me, although it was only the shadow of someone much older, a child holding a kite, trailing along the water’s edge, and a thousand greying seagulls left for dead. •
