We’ve filled up the room with dead horses, though we’re poor small things. I don’t have an answer. I stand, run my fingers between the tiles, her feet swinging from the counters while we’re drawing the same line back and forth until we’ve both become inaudible.
The day before we were accidental witnesses to a man on the platform who lurched and met the ground with blood that pooled to a thick shadow. Today I feel like I’ve been stepped on. We phoned help, told the woman at the gate but any more we were useless; the train came. Walking home she told me about unrolling her mother’s clothes from the drawers and pulling at the threads for three days after the funeral. She was the nicest she knew how. We made it to our house where there had to be something to do– build something or stir something– like to prove we were still in this world while the air stayed smelling of iron.
I want to sit down and talk. I feel horrible.
I could make her clothes, sew her up in a thick cloth. I could wrap it around her for days, leave her breathing but remote. It keeps spilling out of her that we’re at a loss, things are uneven– if it could only drip from her tongue to the soft web I could build around her, taking what was edgeless and spongy between us, it disappearing in the threads. This was one small ominous disaster, not a series.
Her feet swinging I tell her I don’t know, slip my hand in the hollow cave behind her knee and move away.