Husk

You're dead now, Mary, so I probably don't even have to apologize. But I feel like I should say that I'm sorry for that week before your kids got around to cleaning out your house, that week where, you know, I lived in it. I'm sorry that I had to break in your bedroom window, and I'm sorry that your asshole oldest, Tad, thought that someone had cat burgled his precious inheritance. You really didn't have much to cat burgle, Mary, but I wouldn't have anyway. There wasn't any point.

I tried it all on before I left, anyways: put a new arm into every empty linen sleeve, placed a new and beating heart beneath every piece of pendant costume jewelry you left to tangle in one nigh-on Gordian knot. There was a whole, self-multiplying universe of shoelaces you forgot in a corner of your closet; your kids won't notice that I've laced them through each abandoned eyelet, won't wonder if you didn't swell out of each pair years ago and why they might be warm.

I spent a whole day in your pool. It was February, sure, but I was convinced that every grain of water had once had a home in one of your pores, and I wanted them in mine, too. I don't want you to think that I loved you; I spent entire nights awake in your bed, but not to lure your ghost in with me. It's just that I can feel you in this house that was your envelope, your sarcophagus, your lonely pocket of air under the avalanche. You died, and you left it behind like the husk of an exhausted boa. You would not mind that I took it up--and I am so comfortable in it, your skin.

Art by James Jean.