—SOUR APPLE BABY, BUT YOU TASTE SO SWEET

                                                         What?

Insistent as a deluge, my wife is always asking me questions.  What’s the cat’s name?  Our granddaughter’s?  Did I like the Amalfi Coast and when did we go there?

            It’s Thursday or it’s Sunday, the night before my next appointment where I’ll take more inane tests.

            Out the window, stars are aligned in crooked rows, glittering like the pair of braces Donna Patton kissed me with, her tongue nowhere to be found, my lips left bruised in puffy waffle patterns. 

Out the window, a gravid moon’s carrying our first child, Ezra, but he won’t make it to the third trimester—that’ll be Liam. 

Out the window, the cloud cover resembles my father’s work rags, smudged with soot and regret, reminding me of the day he left a pile of them near the sink and never came back.

The things I recall are water-clear, like the window itself.  The ones I can’t remember are slippery porcelain, shattering at my feet.

            I roll over on the mattress. get a whiff of my wife’s skin.  It smells festive, like pumpkin bread and Halloween.  Lying flat-backed, her neck has a galaxy of creases and age spots the size of dimes.  Still, she’s as beautiful as that day when we, we, we what?

            “What?” my wife asks, her eyes expectant and glossy with moonlight.

            “I just remembered something.”

            “What?”

I feel baffled and untethered, forgetting what I just forgot.

“Honey, tell me.”

I think.  I think and blink and think.  It was something about the way she looked, this naked woman in bed with me.

“I think I remember,” I say. “I think I remember this,” I say, my fingers moving across the sheet on their own accord, uncertain yet determined.