Untitled
after Viviane Houle
She couldn’t sleep anywhere she had been with him: not the bedroom, of course, that was out first thing. Not the living room, not the backyard where they hammered together the swing set on Christmas Eve three years before, their breath foggy in front of them as they laughed.
Every room in the house held a memory, or seven, and she tried to sleep in each of them, and could not sleep in any of them.
But tonight it rained, and she dragged her blanket under the skylight in the kitchen, where he had hardly ever gone, the drumming of giant drops soothing to her jangled gut,
curled up like a tiger’s kitten,
and slept, the space between her stomach and her knees small enough to contain her life since she had gotten him out, her inky dreams pooling there beneath the rain.