By Dean Charpentier

She says, I know what it’s like to be dead.

She runs her hand up the rough surface of the porch post, lets her fingers trace lightly over the curves, lets them catch momentarily on the splinters, the knots. Her hair moves slightly in the breeze off the lake, which ripples with the setting of the red sun.

She says, My organs are made of stone. My blood is a fine sand.

My feet are wet already with evening dew. My socks squeak inside my shoes as I stand below her.  I haven’t brought her here for this. Darkness gathers more quickly than I had hoped.  It presses on the corners of my eyes. Already she is dim on the steps above me, blurring into the outline of the cabin. The trees surround us, awkward, like friends trying not to eavesdrop.

She responds to a question I haven’t asked. There are no things, just symbols—the truth of me is in my spirit. My body is inconsequential.

I think, That’s not true. I can feel the memory of her body now, pressed against me, and the loud energy of her lips.

She says, My truth is the truth of the lake, of the trees, of the wind. She says, I am everything.

Her eyes close. Her white hospital gown rustles in the night air, and in the dimness it looks like her soul leaving her body, hovering about her. I envision her here an hour from now, when it is colder, when her breath will escape as vapor, disappear around her head in the dark like a bat.

She says, I feel the darkness.

I hear her breathe deeply, hold it, then exhale.

She says, I can taste the dark.

Then, I know why you brought me here. It’s okay. You can touch me. It’s what you want.

It isn’t all I want, but she is right like an unfinished symphony is right. I go up one step, she is still above me, and I press my head to her stomach, the unhealthy softness real through the thin cotton. She runs her hands through my hair, pulling me to her. She walks me up to the porch and to the swing, and she sits me down. She wears nothing beneath the hospital gown and sits next to me and lowers her head to my shoulder in the chill night.

We are a strange and wonderful tableau. Her breath is hard, rasping, and implies distance.

I think of the red strawberry juice that ran down her chin as she laughed last summer in sunlight, in the field just through the woods.

Later, she stands and doesn’t notice that her gown catches above one hip.  Her white haunches roll like gears as she walks to the railing, leans on it.

She says, Do you feel better?

Yes, I say.

Then, Is that why you stole me away?

I didn’t steal you.

She says, You don’t own me. You took me. That’s stealing.

I don’t know if she means this afternoon when I took her from the hospital, or the night I first snuck her out of her parents’ house, the day after we met.

I like to think you had some part in it, I say.

She says, That’s true. I’m sorry. I make my own decisions. I didn’t mean to hurt you by implying it wasn’t my free will to go with you.

That’s okay, I say, but it isn’t okay. She has clearly forgotten our agreement. Her request, which seems quaint and ancient now. I join her at the railing and we watch the lake leak into the night. The hills across the water we can only detect with senses other than sight. Shapes morph into inferred presence, then finally into potential language. What word would I invent to speak the concept of hill? I wonder. What word for loneliness? For touch?

Stars appear.

She says, You’ll be okay. Then, Memory always recreates things in the present tense. 

I can smell the grass, the forest, but her scent is stronger because she hasn’t bathed recently, and she smells faintly of antiseptic too. I picture us having sex and I’m ashamed of the thought. But she knows that and takes my hand and leads me inside, to the back bedroom where we spent many summers and some autumns like this one.

She takes off her robe and the silver ambient light from a billion distant suns enters through the window and paints her flesh like mercury, fragile like winter’s first ice, or blown glass. Her thin skin is laced with blue veins like the scales of a fish, her bald head glows like her diminished breasts. I focus on the black bruise where the IV punctured her. She crawls between flannel sheets and I take off my clothes and join her, and I can’t tell where she ends and the sheets begin.

Later, while she sleeps, my bladder wakes me and I piss for a long time in the dark.

I walk to the kitchen, naked, get a glass of water from the sink and drink deeply. Suddenly I am hungry, but don’t want to eat while she can’t keep anything in her stomach, so I gaze out the window at the quicksilver landscape, primed now in moonlight. All is still. 

I go back to bed and pull her to me, enveloping her fragile skeleton, folding her brittle bones into my belly. Her shoulder blades slice into my chest. There is only her breathing to mock the cabin’s night sounds, the random cracks and snaps of the contracting frame. 

I lay still so I can listen to her breathe. I sleep.

The next morning, she is cold and stiff and a little blue. I pull my arm from under her head and slip from the bed, and I hurry to the bathroom to dry heave. 

I go back to the bedroom where predawn light has made the scene more bearable. I dress and wrap her in the sheet. Her face isn’t troubled, but also not entirely peaceful. Neutral. She is awkward to carry, already somewhat stiff and hard to manage, but I am able to get her out the front door and down to the dock. Mist rises from the lake like the souls of fish.

Once, after sex, she had said, I think when I orgasm my heart stops for a moment.

No, I had said, that’s when you sneeze, and she had laughed

But last night she had said, No, my heart is stopping. 

Or maybe I had imagined her saying that.

The boat’s waves are the first ripples of the morning, and they spread out from me like radiation to the far shore, where as slim shadows of themselves they caress the smooth dark stones.

Near the center of the lake, I tie her to the heavy cinder blocks we arranged together yesterday.  Awkward, I heave her up to the side, then drop her over. Then the blocks go in and they dive eagerly under the black water, then her body disappears with a quick sucking sound and then I am alone.

I watch small bubbles on the surface. Under me in the icy water lies her future and my past, intersected. I imagine her passing through our layered story on the way down, words and images like sediment, events both mundane and catastrophic, past faces and memories both bright like day and dim like the gloaming, and one finally as brilliant as the sunrise, and that is the memory of our meeting and parting in one.

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Charpentier is a writer and teacher of literature and creative writing living in North Andover, MA, where he was a recent winner of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest. His poetry has appeared in BODY Magazine, Expressionist Magazine, Eunoia Review, Wild Roof Journal, English Journal; his fiction in Fiction Southeast; and his essay in Andovers Magazine. He has spent an over 30-year career in education attempting to chip away at the canon from the inside, like escaping from Shawshank. Accomplices in this mission are wife Lori, daughter Taylor, son JP, and pandemic goldendoodle Odin, whose barking would surely give them all up in a zombie apocalypse. Nonetheless, they will keep him.