Do Us Part.

And then he came back. When she answered the door, her skin was still so tight from crying that her face felt too small for her head; she hadn't been out of bed in a week, and she had thought that the knock would be another fucking pound cake from some family member who had been out of town for calling hours. But it was him. The elbows on his suitjacket were down to the threads, and you could see little windows of bone along his forehead and knuckles and upper lip. But still, he was there.

At first, she didn't really question it. They made pizza rolls, sat on the loveseat and watched that Ninja Warrior show he'd always liked. After about an hour, she asked him how he'd been, and he sort of laughed--there was a gap in the trachea, so the sound was something between a wheeze and a german consonant--and started looking around for a notepad. Enough about me, babe, let's talk about you.

Every morning, she made his coffee like she used to (Maxwell brand slow roasted, honey instead of sugar) and he packed his briefcase and snuck out the back door, then under the gap in the fence. She wasn't quite sure where he went; his old boss sent her a condolences card with a lecherous post script, so she knew he wasn't going back to the plant. She clandestinely checked the corners of his mouth for blood when he came home, but there was never anything beyond a crescent of dirt under each of his fingernails, a missing shoe now and then.

Besides this, nothing was all that different. At night, he curled next to her her the way he always had, his arms twisted around her torso like some kind of human Möbius strip. He still refused to talk about kids, but when Drew Barrymore came onscreen during ET, he went kind of soft in the eyes. All in all, they were as happy as they'd ever been, maybe more. Instead of going to Louie's with his brother every friday, he stayed in with her and played Scrabble with all the E's taken out.

But after a few weeks, something was different. The wound along his ribs began to creep apart like a spreading stain, the mortician's stitches splitting and fraying as the hole reopened bloodlessly. He tried to shower, and immediately they realized that it had been a mistake; the embalming fluid stained the tub green, and he started to look a little like Kitty Carlisle after a bad night. She told him it was okay, that she didn't care, and she held her breath defiantly when she kissed him despite the smell. She slid him a note between the candlesticks on the dinner table: I love you no matter what. You were gone, and now you're here, and of course I wouldn't expect you to come back the same as you left.

He wrote her back a few days later, on a post-it which he left on the kitchen door above a pair of muddy footprints and a chunk of hair on the linoleum. I'm sorry, it said. But let's not shit ourselves here. Please, for your own sake, don't forgive me.



(zombie spiderman from http://www.marvel.com/news/comicstories.647).