I couldn’t wait to shake you awake, although I’d been warned to see which way the wind blew first. I thought of you on the beach, running through sand, running like sand in a timeless hourglass. I thought of you stripping off your shirt to get sun on your chest—smooth and white as a cigarette stubbed out in a silver hotel urn. Extinguished so that Fred Astaire, elegant as a ghost, could rise to dance with Ginger Rogers cheek-to-cheek. I thought of you rising, shedding flecks before the heat started to burn—through celluloid film, through long waltzing bones.
I could keep you like this or make you disappear, like any ordinary lover. Wading barefoot into our lake, I felt your tongue between my toes like mud and minnow bites. I was soaked to the waist, jeans anchoring me like stovepipes, a teasing wind on my neck, like breathing.
The cardboard brick resisted my shaking hands. Then the lid wrenched free with a splash. I looked down into a black hole flecked with stars. Matter is transformed, not destroyed. I stirred silk and soot and chipped molecules with my fingers. You were an exotic spice, the lining of a terrarium, a soil sample from Mars.
Not dead, just falling like snow in the dark. Your gray box, a Cubist boat, took the longest to sink.
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“Matter is transformed, not destroyed,” is such a wonderful way to think of things. The images in this piece are beautiful.
I love this, Angele.
Really beautiful writing.