I found my own skull under the kitchen table, as cracked and
hollow as I am. It had gathered dust since the two years
that I've been gone, as I had. I bent my aching knees to
pick it up, brushed it off, and lay it in front of me. The
jaw came off in my hands. I slid my finger across the
shattered left eye socket, and felt the weight of the
eyepatch across the left side of my face, which I have
managed to become indifferent to in the last two years.

The whole house needed a good dusting. I started sneezing,
cursing my pain and my weakness. My oily heart was in a jar
in the bedroom closet, on the top shelf. My elbows hurt too
much to get it down. I was afraid I might break it. But only
for a moment. I lay on my old bed, and slept like the dead.


I dreamt I was alive, making cheese sandwiches for the boys,
cutting wood in the back yard, painting by the stream,
laughing with my man, falling from a horse, hitting a rock,
dying in the fields...

When I awoke, I visited their graves, to tell their gray
stones, as usual, that I forgive them. When sunrise came, I
went back down into the soil, to wait two more years in
anguish before I could rise again. They should never have
called me back from the dead. And, on my death bead, in the
fields that I had ploughed, I should never have begged them
to.