Recipe for Raising the Dead
*Published 2004 in Suspect Thoughts: a journal of subversive writing
*Honorable Mention in “Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: 18th Annual Collection”
Recipe for Raising the Dead
When I was little, me and some neighborhood kids would go down by the pond at Gracie Halstead’s house and we’d all collect frogs. And this one day her brother came by with a knife he was using to shape pointed spears out of crooked tree branches, and he took the frog I was holding and sliced it nearly in half, so my frog’s body sort of folded back. Then he took Gracie’s frog, stuffed it inside mine, and sewed the frog back up with his mother’s cross stitch needles–and I remember how that frog hopped off, how it could still hop cut up with another frog inside it, and Gracie was crying but it got me to thinking, it got me to wanting to somehow get myself back inside another body, one that was bigger and could hold me.
My husband died a week ago. And I need him back because there are some things he’s left undone. He was going to hang the potrack we’d gotten for Christmas, and help me take down the ornaments off the tree, and he always said he’d teach me how to play chess even though I said I never wanted to learn but now I definitely do.
I miss the Macaroni dinners he made on Thursday nights, and the sound of his change going into the rabbit jar. I miss the sliver of Irish Spring he kept in the shower that’s gone now because I took out a fork and a knife and I ate it on Thursday for supper. I miss the taste of him.
On Friday and Saturday I laid in the dark with the curtains drawn and the covers up over my head. On Monday and Tuesday I crawled into a refrigerator box and imagined the weight of the earth above me. And on Thursday my sister called, suggesting in that way of hers, that if I couldn’t get it together maybe I should just raise Billy up from the dead.
The cat’s missing and I have to climb under the house to get her, down on my knees, and it’s getting my dress dirty but who cares because the dress is black—and it’s filthy anyway because I’ve been wearing it mostly every day since the Saturday of the funeral when they put Billy under the ground.
I love my fucking cat. And I need to hold her in my arms and give her a little kiss between her ears and keep her here, inside the house. Only suddenly I’m thinking I don’t love her enough, because she’s been gone everyday since Billy’s been dead and I haven’t noticed until today because Billy was the one who always got her when she was scared and lodged herself under the middle section of the porch. I never realized how low to the ground he got, the scratches on his body from the dirt. It’s funny to think that something like dirt can cut into you. It’s funny because now I’m thinking of Billy and how I didn’t love him enough either because he’s stuck under something too, only it isn’t the porch, and I can’t call to him, and it isn’t as easy as crawling over dirt to get him back.
I’m holding Winnie in my arms and suddenly I’m remembering all the little kittens she had that we gave away last fall. They came out and I had this notion they weren’t her babies at all, but her little organs falling out of a big hole inside her, and I had this strange urge to put them back, to just stuff the kittens back inside. Winnie’s pulling away from me now, even though I’m touching her underbelly like she likes, and I have this strange notion my cat knows what I’m about to do.
The woman at “The Mystic Shop” gave me a list of things to gather. It was a bit like a recipe, how all the ingredients were numbered out. The first thing on the list was:
1) One pet of the deceased.
The second thing on the list was:
2) One load of semen from someone in the dead’s immediate family. Brother or Father preferred.
I don’t have to go in order, but there seems to be something in being able to. It helps me to focus. I’m trying to look at this rationally.
I call up Billy’s mother and tell her I’d like to come over for dinner. She almost cries on the phone, saying how worried they’ve all been about me which pisses me off for some reason because I don’t want her wasting item number 3 on the list: mourning tears, before I can get over there to collect them. The atmosphere is nice, cordial, pleasant and everyone’s “dressed” for dinner except for me I’m wearing my funeraldress. And Mrs. Y (for Yarborough which is how I think of her even though I’m supposed to think of her as “mom”) looks so lovely with her hair pulled back in a smooth french twist and she keeps putting her hand on mine like she’s trying to tell me something only she can’t figure out how. And thank god Daniel’s here, he’s been staying with his parents for the past few weeks and he’s wanted to fuck me ever since Billy brought me home for that first Thanksgiving. The semen really shouldn’t be a problem.
I take Daniel’s dick out of his pants and it’s big much bigger than Billy’s. I don’t know why I thought it was going to look the same but it’s too thick and pale–and the whole thing isn’t going like I thought it would because Daniel’s saying things to me like, “Take it in deeper. Do it like I tell you to,” and for some reason I thought we would be fucking and that it would be gentle and slow and I would close my eyes and it would be an almost-Billy. But here I am on my knees and it’s taking so long, and the rhythm’s off and he’s squeezing my head between his hands like he’s trying to pop open my skull jamming his dick into the back of my throat saying, “Christ, who taught you how to suck cock,” and I’m making these loud gagging noises and then something happens because suddenly he gets really still. His dick goes soft. I look up at him and he’s crying. There are tears leaking out of his eyes. I don’t know what to do. I can feel his heart reaching into mine wanting to take some of my skin to patch the hole in his. And I want to give it to him–he seems like he needs it, but there’s fluid coming from his eyes and there’s supposed to be fluid coming from his dick and I need both of them.
So I take the Kleenex I was going to use to wipe away his cum and I wipe off his tears and wipe until the Kleenex is so soggy it’s breaking apart. And suddenly I’m scared because I don’t think he’s ever going to stop not with the way his body is shaking so hard like his ribs are going to pop out because he can’t get air enough to breathe. So I sing to him. Even though I’ve never sung for anybody but Billy and I wrap my arms around Daniel’s back, I hold his body in mine and I belt out, “Sittin on the Dock of the Bay,” which was one of Billy’s favorite Otis Redding songs.
And Daniel stops. His body goes quiet. He leans his neck onto my shoulders and we stay like that for a moment, his body limp in our hug. But just a moment. Because what I really need is for him to be hard. So I take his fingers which he doesn’t need to lick because they’re already wet from his tears and I push them inside me whispering in his ear how much I want him to fuck me and in no time he’s the one shoving his fingers in and out of my pussy and oh god it’s so nice–not because it feels good but because his dick is so hard, and pretty soon I have Daniel’s cum in another wad of tissue paper, on the floor of the room that Billy and Daniel used to share as boys.
I’m staying in the guest room, not sleeping–waiting for everyone else too–trying to remember what my body’s supposed to feel like. My heart’s too full of Billy and it’s sunk to some place inside me and frozen there–a used up sort of frozen like forgotten popsicles that’ve melted and been refrigerated back close to the same shape, only not, and besides the taste is funny. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a zombie; it’s hard to move, like you’re walking in water. I used to take baths all the time, but since they found Billy under the dock I have a hard time sitting in a tub. I didn’t even shower before I came over here, just sort of wet down my hair and sponged myself off. Maybe the real reason Daniel didn’t want to fuck me is because I smell bad.
Oh but so Winnie. Earlier today I cut into her with the sharpest butcher knife in the drawer and all I could think of was that I always wanted to be a surgeon but I didn’t have the grades. I just wanted to reach into someone’s body and hold their organs in my hand, but I was afraid if I was standing there with someone’s liver or heart cradled in my palm that I wouldn’t put it back. That I’d just squish it, or eat it, or put it into my own body so I could work more efficiently. But Winnie’s organs weren’t for me, they were for Billy and I sealed each of them tightly in Saran Wrap and put them in the basement freezer next to the piece of wedding cake we were going to eat on our 10th anniversary.
That thought leads me to this next one which is that if I do bring Billy back from the dead, then I’ll be able to bring Winnie back too and Billy will have a pet that understands him.
I have to go into Billy’s mother’s room now to get item number 4 on the list.
The moon is waxing. Which is not something I usually think about only I’ve got to think about it because this means that tonight and tomorrow are the only times I’ve got left to get the rest of the ingredients because tomorrow the moon will be full and that’s when everything’s got to take place. So it really is a good thing I came over for dinner tonight otherwise I would’ve had to wait a whole month longer to get Billy back and already I’m worried about his body. I wonder if he’s lost some of his skin. I wonder how much the body decomposes in an almost-month. I wonder if when I dig him up and see the him that’s not him, if I’ll still want him back–as he is, I mean. You can’t change people, you have to accept them for who they are, my father always said that and that’s something I believe.
It’s funny to slip into someone else’s room and watch them sleeping.
It makes you quieter, makes your breath slow down. This is what Billy and I would have done if we’d had children, crept into their rooms after dark, checked to see their chests were still breathing, laughed at the way their innocent little bodies unawarely slept.
Something about the way Mr. and Mrs. Y are lying in bed with their feet and arms kicked out from under the covers reminds me of children, but this room is unfamiliar and filled up with unfamiliar things and if we’d had children–Billy and I–we’d know our little sleeping one’s room, we’d have decorated it ourselves. We’d have painted the den rose and moved the second TV into our bedroom, we’d have filled the room up with dolls and teddy bears and a crib and a rocking chair, we’d have made the room over from the inside out.
I’d only seen this room once before the day of my baby shower when Mrs. Y took me upstairs to give me a pair of hose because mine’d gotten caught on the coffee table and had run clear up to my knee (you could see my skin through the hole). We still had a few minutes before the other women started to arrive with baby presents that would be wrapped in pink and I remember Mrs. Y riffling through the second drawer of her mahogany dresser pulling out pairs of stockings, looking for a black set that’d match my ruined ones, while I looked around at the colors of her room trying to decide what to paint the den.
So anyway I know what’s supposed to be inside Mr. and Mrs. Y’s room, that the curtains are yellow and the dresser is brown, and that there’s a colorful rose quilt over the bed. But with the only light being that moon outside, all the colors of their room look ghostly, dark which gets me to thinking that maybe the colors of things at night, maybe these are the real colors, the underneath colors before light cuts into the room. I stretch back my palm and stare at my wrist and think about the blood flowing under the skin. Someone once told me that blood was blue before it comes to the surface and I want to cut myself, and look inside and see if that is true.
It’s so fucking cold in the Y’s room. I don’t know how they can sleep in the cold like that, apart like that, not even with their bodies next to each other creating heat between them. He’s on the left side of the bed reaching for her and she’s all the way on the right turned towards the window, her hair fanning out over the pillow like a small beautiful throw. And there is an easier way, but watching them there together it doesn’t seem big enough (to take the easy way) not enough enough because Mrs. Y doesn’t even know what she has and if that had been me, if that had been my Mr. Yarborough he would have been near me, inside of me, and we would have been fucking and fucking till our bodies were slick to the touch.
Quietly, very quietly, I uncross my arms and move from my resting place against the wall. My bare feet sink into the thick carpet, my funeraldress comes so close it brushes the side of the bed. I walk to the dresser on Mrs. Y’s side of the room and slide my hand past a hairbrush to a pair of scissors next to a bottle of Mrs. Y’s sleeping pills. I wrap my palm around the scissor loops, and move towards the bed with the blade pointed down. I don’t want to trip and fall and stab myself in the gut–a fear my mother put into me when I was very young and one I always remember when I walk (never run) with scissors in my hand. I kneel beside Mrs. Y. My eyes are even with hers and there’s only a finger’s distance between us. I could kiss her on the forehead. I could kiss her on the mouth which has a familiar little v that dips down and then back up and I could lick that perfect lip, maybe stick my tongue inside her mouth which is so much like his mouth only the skin around it would be softer because she doesn’t have a beard that’s always peeking through, always trying to grow back. I take the scissors and I place them right next to Mrs. Y’s ear and I begin to cut. I cut and I cut as close as I can get to her neck and her ear and her scalp so that when she wakes up in the morning to brush her long beautiful locks, all of it will be gone. And I hate her. I hate her for having Billy–for ever thinking to have him because if he hadn’t been born then I wouldn’t be feeling this way my body wouldn’t be aching and thawing and freezing. And I hate her for getting years with Billy that I never had, I hate that Billy lived inside her, and that she got to be with him like that. So I take all of it, there is so much of it, thick beautiful strands that I can’t carry in my fist alone so I pull up the bottom of my shirt–make a make-shift sort of basket exposing my belly which feels warm now. I carry it all into the guest room and put it in two baggies which I label “Mrs. Y” and “Extra Mrs. Y” in the white labeling section of the Ziplock bags and I do the labeling with a ballpoint pen because for some reason that’s the type of pen that works best.
I am keeping a record of this. And I’m not sure why. But here I am writing these very words down (on a recipe card–front and back) and sometimes I use more than one. I really love these cards, I got them as a wedding present from Billy’s Aunt Evelyn and each of them has 1 of 4 patterns on the front either: a pair of carrots, a soup and spoon, an ice cream cone with a fallen scoop, or my favorite, the broccoli and celery (which look like 2 old men with wild hairdo’s). I like how they’re all paired up (I’ll be part of a pair again soon). Once I write these things down, I stick them back in the recipe box and I pull down the clear plastic top and I’m glad they are safely inside something, and that the plastic is clear, and that they are properly contained.
My body hurts so much that my brain can’t seem to put things together. My emotions feel like large pointed anchors that are rooting into the ground, they keep going deeper; they’re the ones digging him up. But it’s nice to know where someone is, and what they’re doing. It just makes me feel more secure somehow to know that Billy’s in his grave. He is, isn’t he? This isn’t just some elaborate plot to escape me?
Here’s what happens the second time I go to “The Mystic Shop.” The same mechanical wolf howls as I open the door, the same sign hung over a witch’s broom announces a 30% off sale on crystals, and I’m sort of expecting the same middle aged woman with too much eyeliner and an engagement ring tattoo to be behind the counter. But instead there is a girl with bumblebee barrettes standing on a step stool reaching to put a cauldron back on the shelf and the first thing I think is that Billy would like her because she looks a lot like me. She’s the type of girl he could lie on top of and cover two of her whole. The second thing I think of is that I must’ve left my list at home because I’m searching through my purse but I can’t find the post-it note I’ve made with my shopping list (one item starts with a c) and I’m kind of annoyed I had to come back. After all, if the first woman had read the list (and probably she had because she seemed like the thorough type) didn’t she know there were things I wouldn’t be able to get at the local supermarket store? Maybe they wanted return business. Maybe most people that came here kept cypress oil (that was it) in their kitchen cabinets; maybe I looked like the sort that did. That’s when I feel beneath my black silk dress, the outline of a small paper square which is the list I’d placed inside my pocket so it wouldn’t get lost. Quickly I take it out and yell to the girl, “I’ve found it!” but she’s right across the counter and I think I startle her because she drops the glass pendent she’s nearly placed in the jewelry case and it shatters to the floor. But when I hand her the paper, I’m relieved, and she’s relieved, and she goes off to collect the cypress oil and the elder berries and the valerian poultice and the lemon balm and the rose quartz sphere that are the 12th and 13th and 14th and 16th and 17th items on the list.
Now I go to our Lakehouse which is up at Sinclair and which is a 45 minute drive from my house. You’d think it would be strange to come here, that there would be some sense of doom and gloom especially because it’s 5:00 just before winter-dark, but I don’t feel anything except that this house needs a good clean which is what I always feel after I turn the key and switch on the inside lights. I open the cabinets left of the kitchen sink and remove a large glass jar that I think used to hold pickles. I take it with me, open the sliding glass doors, and walk out onto the steps that lead down to the dock.
Billy came down to the Lakehouse at least once a week after I had that thing (miscarriage). He’d stick his feet in the water if it was warm enough, and if it wasn’t he’d curl them up under him and wrap his arms around his knees. He said he liked to watch the boats going under the bridge by Andy Sheehan’s marina. He said it was so wide that sometimes you thought the boats might get lost inside. But really he wasn’t looking at the boats; really he was looking at that brackish, muddied water, like he should have been able to see something beneath.
I take the container and dip it full of Lake Sinclair water because item number 9 on my list is: a jarful of the place where the dead passed on. The water is cold, and I haven’t touched it since that thing two years ago and it’s hard for me to think of that so instead I wonder what I’d be putting inside this jar if Billy had died in a car crash (broken car glass?), or from a mugging in the street (trash from a nearby bin?) or what I’d pick if he’d died in the bed beside me. I guess I’ve got it simple because Billy drowned underneath our dock so I’m getting lakewater, though if he’d died in our bed I’d probably use his pillowcase because I bet a silk pillowcase would stuff inside a pickle jar easy.
Three bills come today and I pay them. I never realized how easy it was. I thought I’d have to do math (which I was never very good at) but they have it all lined out and totaled up in a box with bold print and there’s a smaller envelope stuffed inside the bigger envelope and all you have to do is put in the check and add postage. When Billy was here they would sit on the table until he came home seeming ominous somehow, like they were breathing. And he’d always pay them straight away, during TV or right before supper. He’d just tear into them and I was glad that he ripped them open. Bills seemed like they deserved that.
I wonder what it was like for her. (We had a name for her Emily Yarborough but she didn’t live so I just think of her as her). I wonder if she knew while she was swimming around inside me that my insides were wrong and that by the time she got out she would be dead. I wonder if she drowned. I wonder if that’s how I’ll die too. Things happen in threes and drowning could be something that runs in the family.
Also when Dr. Olson took my womb out of me I remember having the thought I didn’t want to lose anything else. I made a promise to keep the rest of me intact.
Digging Billy up is easier than I thought it would be. I had this weird notion that there’d be an alarm or something that’d go blaring when Nokum and I put shovels into the ground. And probably I shouldn’t have picked up a homeless man but there he was sitting by the interstate ramp when I got back from Lake Sinclair. And I needed someone’s help and there was no one I knew that I could ask to accompany me to a graveyard at night to dig up my dead husband except maybe my sister but I didn’t think she would do it partly because the request for any physical labor on her part is an automatic, “No.” Nokum sits in the car while I buy 2 shovels at Lowe’s, and asks for a value meal number 2 at the drive through of McDonald’s and never once do I get the sense that he wants to steal from me, or rape me even though I can tell he’s a strong guy underneath his loose fitting clothes. He takes to the digging quite naturally, dirt is skin too, you know, skin is anything that covers something up and we cut into it, Nokum and me, only he works faster because he’s strong, and because I can’t seem to get the shovel to work right because shovels are heavier than you think. And it’s quiet and I’m not saying anything and he only speaks to say things, like “Pardon me,” and “Better if you stay up here.” And even as he climbs down into the hole and pulls out Billy’s body, he never once flinches or asks me any questions, and it makes me wonder about his life, what sort he’s had.
Also, I’ve never seen a graveyard at night except in a horror movie, and then all the characters move around carefully, afraid, but while we’re digging up Billy I’m not scared at all, I’m just thinking how glad I am. It’s like Christmas almost, unwrapping all this dirt to get to the box at the bottom, and inside will be Billy and he won’t just be a memory, or a feeling but something real I can touch. It’s funny how when you’re doing physical labor you can feel all of the parts of yourself you didn’t know you had, muscles you take for granted get sore, you feel the bottoms of your feet connecting with the straight edge of the shovel. It’ll be nice to get him out of the ground, something I’ve really worked for, and I’m glad I didn’t get him cremated like we did with her because her ashes just scattered on the wind and hardened into dirt and Billy said she’d be a part of things–inside the beaks of birds, absorbed up through the roots of a flower–that she’d live on that way but that’s not really the case. She’s gone. Disappeared. Billy’s here though, and soon I’ll be able to touch him. I can’t wait to hold his body against my own. I knew there was a reason not to put him in that incinerator.
Instincts are things you should trust.
Nokum takes Billy into the bedroom by himself because it’s, “Easier that way.” I watch him adjust Billy’s head so that it rests in the middle of the pillow, and we both reach at the same time to take off Billy’s shoes. In the graveyard-dark Nokum’d just been a figure hunched over a shovel, but in the bedroom-dark he stands his full height, tall as the curtain rod and wide as two of me and his body is closer to a Billy-body than Billy’s brother’s or Billy’s father’s or the man who’d sold me item number 10 on the list two fresh chicken eggs. Nokum and I are facing each other, and I can feel the tips of his shoes pressing into mine and standing here I can’t help but think what it might be like if this warm man put on Billy’s cold clothes, and lay in Billy’s suit, in the center of Billy’s bed.
I open my wallet and give Nokum everything inside (82 minus McDonald’s) and it feels like paying the lawn boy or the pizza delivery man except not exactly because we are in my bedroom and because I accidentally touch Nokum’s hand when I place the money in his palm–in the dark I can think of it as Billy’s hand, and I want him to bring it to my mouth, trace it across my lips, slide that thumb between my thighs and use his index finger to work my clit. Instead, Nokum curls his fingers into a fist, shoves his money in his front shirt pocket and leaves the bedroom saying, “You take care of yourself miss.”
So here is my Billy on our bedroom bed. It must be one of the miracles of modern embalming and probably partially because of the cold weather too but it’s been a month to the day and he still looks like Billy, except for that the makeup they put on for the viewing has worn from his face and his hands and the colors are wrong. Billy’s all shades of blue.
I take off his clothes. I unbutton his suit jacket and pull his arm through the sleeve and it takes me a while, because undressing a man is harder than undressing yourself, or a child, and anyway I want to take my time. To remember the feel of his shoulders and his elbows and his wrist, remember how it is to have his back in my arms. I remove his tie and his belt and his pants and his shirt.
Sometimes when I’m in this room all I can do is think of him. Even when he was gone he had a presence here still, like his cologne, or his coffee–his scent got trapped in the walls. And all I want to do, even now, is wrap up inside his body. I want to play turtle like we use to when I was the turtle and he was the shell and it felt so warm and safe with him around me, my body hidden by his, until I’d lift out my little head, and he’d stretch his shell-body into his Billy-body and put his face even with mine. Then he would slip his tongue inside me, and his cock inside me, and I’d be the one on top and we’d be playing a different game, the one where I was the slutty cheerleader and he was the prize football star.
When he is naked the thing I am struck by are the wounds on his body. How when you are dead people cut into you forcefully, without care. It seems to me like this is what people have always been wanting to do. To open you up and take out what’s yours.
There is a huge Y cut across his shoulders and down to his pubic bone (I used to put one of my hands on that pubic bone when I was sucking his cock (just to get my balance because I get dizzy down on my knees bobbing my head back and forth) and I’m really angry that someone else thought they could touch him there). It looks like a bizarre sort of monogram and why is it that they marked him like that? Who are these people who got to his body before I had the chance?
I take a sponge from the bucket beside me. I wish there was skin inside it instead of water and that I could paint him over and wipe the cuts away. I wring out the sponge so that most of the water goes back into the pail because even though I’m supposed to clean him, I don’t want to get him too wet because what if he’s frightened of water now, even though the water in the pail is sinkwater that came from the kitchen and not lakewater that came from the lake (though I will have to use that water later).
Part of me is glad there was an autopsy. Not because of what people said, I know it was an accident, but because it seemed to make Mrs. Y happier. She’s one of those types that needs to know things and she would have always wondered if he’d been drinking that day, or if he’d put weights in his pockets or if I was the one who shoved him off the dock. I hope she’s not too angry with me for cutting off her hair.
Here are some of the directions that came in the blue bottle stoppered with cork: Once you have collected all the ingredients, find a quiet room. Set out two small votive candles and allow them to burn completely. Burn the sage, cleansing the area, preparing for the dead to return. Make a circle around the dead with salt. Cleanse the dead with a clean towel, rosemary soap, and water. Open the stomach of the dead with a knife coated in lemon balm. Once the stomach is open, place the items on the list into the dead’s body. State your reason for bringing the dead back. Soak the thread in cypress oil and bayberry leaves and stitch up the body while seeing the person clearly in your mind as you’d like them to be. Make a cut on your right finger with the same knife you used before. Allow the blood from the tip of your finger to seep into the stomach of the dead. Ring the bell twice.
I know what I said earlier about the cuts on his body, but I have to admit, part of me is glad the Y is there because it’s easier to do something if you have a path to follow. I cut along the stitch line with my sewing scissors, and it reminds me of the perforated lines of paychecks because his body opens easily, like it wants to be torn.
I take the v part of the Y of Billy’s body and pull it back, fastening it with two needles to the center of his throat, and even though it doesn’t matter I try to do it gently. The pins go in easy like pushing a tack into the corkboard by the kitchen phone.
Now I can see inside him. A few of his ribs have been cut back. Everything else is gone. No heart, lung, kidney, liver. No intestines, stomach, or spleen. And I don’t know what they did with it all. I don’t even know where his organs are supposed to go but they’re all missing and I want to know who took them because this is Billy’s body, these are Billy’s things, and I do not understand that they have disappeared. And now I’ll never get to hold his heart in my hand, to breathe air into his lungs and I lean down to look closer into his body but closer doesn’t help because everything is gone.
I take off my dress and bra and panties and straddle Billy just below his waist. His body feels different beneath my pussy, cold and spongy, but it’s still Billy with his caterpillar thigh-scar and his almost hairless legs and his boney, boney hips that I used to mind, but that now I really like. I rock back and forth against his outside but he doesn’t move not even a little (some part of me thought he might) so I reach in and touch what’s left of his insides. I trace the broken edge of a rib and reach all the way through to the back of his spine. My face is so close, right near his chest and I press my lips against his sternum and I kiss him there because maybe it will help if he knows I love him. And then I’m kissing him all over like I used too. Only it’s better because I’m not kissing all those places where the bones almost came through, I’m kissing his bone bones and the inside skin tastes like the outside skin (how is that possible) with some places salty and some of them sweeter. I run my tongue across the line of his ribs blowing hot air across them because I know he likes that and once I get to the bottom I realize his ribs are so wide I can move up into them. I feel them shift around me (they aren’t firmly a part of his body anymore) and I wriggle up as far as I can go. I place my cheekbone against the underneath side of his chest bones and it’s so nice because he’s wrapping himself around me again.
I start to sing. I like the way my voice echoes around his body and circles back. I sing all the songs I can remember, church songs, and camp songs, and all his favorite pop music. I sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night,” and every Christmas carol I can think of. I sing, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” which is what he used to sing to me.
And all I want to do is stay inside him. I want to stretch into his feet. I want to slit my body down the back, and pour into him and have him pour into me and our bones would mix together and offer more support. I want to wear him like a costume–to dress up as my husband for Halloween. The thought of that makes me laugh for some reason, loudly, and I have a hard time stopping. And it’s nice to be inside him, and to have his ribs move with laughter again.
If I had one wish, one wish in the whole world, I’d wish that Johnny Halstead would walk through my front door (which isn’t locked because I didn’t follow Nokum out) and come into my bedroom and say, “Hello, how’ve you been?” (and maybe, “Gracie says to tell you, “Hi,”) and then he’d reach down and shove the rest of me inside Billy’s chest cavity, cram in my legs and my feet and my hips. He’d unhook Billy’s stomach flap and pull it taut over the parts of me that are bulging and use the industrial strength needle in the pincushion to my left (pre-strung with bayberry and cypress soaked thread) to sew me in tight. Johnny’d cut his index finger with the lemon balm knife and run it across the line of Billy’s stomach and I’d press a high five against the underside of Billy’s belly (for a job well done). Johnny’d ring the brass bell and finish the spell and all we’d have to do is wait (though I’m not sure how long because there is no mention of that in the directions).
That way, when Billy comes back from the dead, and is fixing our fence, and recycling our Christmas tree and fishing up at the lake with Daniel, I’ll never be without him. Being without someone is lonely and sad, but it sure does make it all the better when you get to see them again. Only I would be seeing Billy from the inside (which is a new perspective) and I think that would make me appreciate my husband all the more. Appreciation’s an important thing for a long term relationship.
© 2005 Milly Sanders All Rights