Dead Letters(110)

“I think she went to say goodbye to you without really saying goodbye to you,” Wyatt said, stroking my dirty hair and kissing my forehead. Another thing left unsaid. I let him rock me while I wept brokenly, again.

Zelda and I had been cannibalizing each other for such a long time that it’s still difficult not to gnaw hungrily on my own portion, but maybe I will get used to the bounty. Certainly my newly augmented dimensions gesture to a healthier appetite.

Nadine’s body was wheeled off to be sliced open and then rendered into ash. I put her bottle-shaped urn straight into the wine rack in the kitchen, where it sat (I like to think contentedly) for several months. Eventually, Wyatt convinced me how pathological this seemed, and was, and I saw his point. There are enough ghosts here. Not the least of which is my own face, staring at me with Zelda’s. Wyatt helped me scatter Nadine with Zelda, in the black skeleton of the barn, the dead letters of their DNA spiraling together. Waiting. After we finished, he put his hands over my belly, kissed it, and promised both of us that we did not have to repeat the past.

Wyatt is a generous human, and he believes that Zelda’s final game was a kindness to me. Over the last few months, I’ve come to agree, though I’m still so furious with her that it wakes me in the night. I think that while I can nearly understand what she was trying to say to me, I will never fully comprehend it. There are still missing pieces. It’s maddeningly painful not to be able to speak with the dead. But maybe what Zelda was trying to tell me is that it’s nearly as difficult to speak with the living.