--WE BOTH KNOW THAT’S NOT TRUE

                             The Hollow Black

Everything feels itchy.  You scratch your scalp a lot, because doubt is a blind earwig skittering through your skull again, upending furniture and bookshelves, those synapses meant to keep you stitched together.

When his mother calls, you drop your cell down the sink, turn on the disposal and listen to the metallic bits crick and clatter.

Around you, the walls all wear ambiguous sand masks and none of the mirrors ever stop snickering.  If you listen acutely, you can almost hear a child say (…)

Yesterday, his pillow smelled like peaches, or sweetened tea gummed around the teeth.  His breath left an island stain on the case, a clue inside a clue, or maybe just a blemish.  But when you lapped and licked at the fabric, it only tasted like cloth, dull and pasty.

You spend hours staring at photographs, studying the sturdy trees you both were then, younger but rooted, entwined, able to withstand a windstorm or power outage.  Like a child’s finger testing heat, you touch the paper wearing your faces.  You run whorls over laugh lines and forehead sheen.  You imagine you are painting different expressions over the grins and smirks, tinkering with frivolous fate.

Next night, you wait until he’s snoring.  Slowly you pull back the sheet.  Take in the crest and fall of his flour sack-belly lined with ant-like hairs. 

He’s familiar but not. 

He could be anybody’s, but he’s yours.

For weeks and weeks now, you’ve thought this through, and so you don’t hesitate. 

It’s not his stomach you aim for, but his chest. 

You stab your hand guillotine-fast through his breast plate, the plunge bringing up nothing at all, not pulp or blood or bone, not even a smidge of dust.

His snores continue unabated, still flaccid, like a pup whimpering in a dream.

You root and root, elbow-deep, shoulder-deep, yet there’s nothing to grasp. 

Everything is wall-less.  

He is only holes.  

Tunnels and carved-out spaces. 

Caves, of empty air.

Flummoxed again, you crawl through the puncture wound and slide into one of the grottos, suspended by air.

You mash your head and think and think, though this has never done you any good before.

So, instead you flail and kick and wretch for once, though your screams only boomerang back.

And then, finally, you know.  For once, with certainty, you do.

You take a deep breath and imagine it tasting spring water-sweet.  In the hollow, black-black-black, you imagine a million different things.   

After a pause, you write his name in the dark murk.  Over the nothingness.  Across the curved abyss. 

You hope that you are smiling, and for extra measure, pretend you are.

You write, I loved you once. 

You write, I’m sorry you had to die, but I’m not sad it was me.