Ten Ways To Die Trying

By Arianna Spellman

‘You're not obligated to win.

You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.’

-Marian Wright Edelman

I watch the foggy morning light move stealthily across a ceiling once white and now a cobwebbed shade of gray. It creeps like a murderer to slay the slumbering Endymion with its sharp light impaling his precious lungs. The jagged January ventilation breathes upon the sharp relief of my shoulderblade, sliding its blade up the ridges of my spine toward the base of my skull. Here the cold does not permeate beneath the lank coils of hair that lie there as if exhausted. The humid weight of my exhalation on the hand beside my cheek is the only affirmation that my heart continues to drum. The silence is a glorious sadness, still and asleep until it is renounced by the living. You stir beside me, jostling our stuffed barrier, but do not wake. I press my chilled fingers together and entreat powers I have on no account given faith to that you are never roused. Sleep is for forgetting, the beautiful dismissal of truth which unwounded souls take for granted. I can believe my own lies when you are not conscious to contradict me.

After all that we surrendered and all that was conquered in turn, here we remain in the sticky morning-after awkwardness. Who would have anticipated this gruesome wake which we mockingly advertise as 'life'? You and I are the corpus delicti of fame like the falling doves inked into your hipbones. Living a life of passivity and mechanical fornication in a place that no one ought to live (and yet everyone does because, dearly beloved, we all die alone in the end). It is the inevitable outcome of every fear I have nourished with Zanax/Welbutrin/Zoloft/Prozac martinis over the years: a nine-to-five job, a five-story walk-up in the ghetto (where the drunkards piss on your doorstep and discard bodies in the dumpster behind your apartment), five children that deserve so much more than either of us could ever give them, and a cabinet of labeled rosy bottles organized alphabetically. The plaster peels from the walls and in stagnant denial we cover it, mask it, conceal the deterioration with sheets of recycled office paper that you rescue from the shredder. I deluge my internal organs onto the discarded profit reports (telling of numbers neither you nor I will ever see again) and fasten them over decaying walls with masking tape and old chewing gum. The scenes depict tales of bursting boils in the earth and the good Samaritans that scrabble from them (these are the authentic demons, you realize when you reside in the dregs of suburbia), for any symphony of horror in blue ink is superior to warped wallpaper.

Sometimes, late at night when we lie on this great plain of cherry-red cotton (one child curled around my thighs, another beneath my arm, a third tucked against your chest while the baby and eldest slumber in their own beds) I allow myself the bitterness that I am selfishly entitled to. My eyes, the vibrant color of jealousy, glass over and I rake short polished nails over the tender white skin of my inner arm in reproach. Thou shall not weep, Réme Infelise. No woman cries as often as I and in this I am a glutton on shame (which femininity never caused, thank god). Your soft restless breathing permeated by the small sighs of anguish that come with troubled slumber is a note I can never replicate, although I was meant to be the vocalist. My hands fist in the stiff fabric of the body-pillow that divides us (although the disunity has no correlation with the material dimension) and I feel like a pill as I watch the delicate rhythm in your little broad back. The philanthropist companion has become a prescribed medication to saturate your veins in placebo relief. My effects are waning as time progresses and with each day your muscle (for it is only the heart that is lacking in function) is ailed with more hemorrhaging. It seeks a chemical compound it has come to recognize is absent for eventually the body identifies that what it is receiving is a fabricated duplicate of that which it desires. My tenacity increases to preserve your original intent for my use; to replace all that had gone to Canada in a 97' Toyota with your Chanel sunglasses. And yet even an enhancement in dosage is hollow. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

We are sitting ducks floundering in a sea without depth, juxtaposed by irony to land in the same circumference of oil-bogged waters. Your utter perfection seduced me from my migration pattern and into the thick black petroleum that coated my feathers and fettered my wings. I thought I would be a rock star. I thought I would fly. But no, I abdicated my tools of deliverance when your pretty little face on your pretty little body on a chair that was neither little nor pretty peered at me over the nondescript heads of a crowd. You and I were strangers that would become a leprous farce of star-crossed lovers (although of course we knew nothing of this at the time). I was too drunk and you too high to comprehend what the lingering of our first handshake insinuated. You stood before me as radiant Callisto with your galactic amber eyes and odorous dreadlocks, a butterball Pothead that made my knees knock together as I fantasized about shrinking myself to a size suitable for housing inside your cardiac cavity. I fell against you to the thrum of music never to be deciphered and basked in the glory of your muscular arms (with their contradictory wrists and rubber bracelets) cradling my scrawny frame. 'Your eyes are green.' you marveled when my nose shyly brushed against your own. I beamed. In those simple words you had reproduced the pre-requisite to stealing my heart: you symbolically recognized that I was more than I appeared. Oh how foolish we were to merge as we did. You were, and remain, the epitome of all that embodies my perfect mate. Perhaps, in the beginning, you truly did love me as much. I was your favorite packaged beverage with a label on my forehead reading 'Instant Human; Just add Callisto'. There was no wholesomeness to be had if I dwelt alone. But you were independent of my existence like a vegan presented with a hamburger.

Fate plays cards with aces up its sleeves and believe me, it is our enemy. When all bets are off there is the lull that promotes suicide, impotence, and substituting vodka for plasma. I fail to comprehend if it was desperation, selfishness, confusion, or utter naivity that ushered us to the ugly side of the tracks. You seesawed like the most coordinated of acrobats from one lover to the other in silent mutiny. Such ignorance bred diseased bliss that still stirs something pathetically optimistic in my internal place of emotion. The nights you spent with your smirk too near my bashful adoration bled into skipped morning classes (the time you used to bang your girlfriend) and lunch dates with a young woman who looked so very much like me. Or perhaps it was the opposite agony of salt in the wound: you wanted me because I reminded you of her. Sad-eyed Réme, abused and fragile, must have appeared so demurely appealing to your domineering eyes. One week into our affair the ceremony was conducted in secret, an unknowing marriage of soul that would ultimately destroy us both. I was enthralled with the intensity of your every syllable and the delicacy with which your mouth brushed my throat like a murmured prayer. You were being gorged on my insights and opinions, hungry little punk that you are. Beneath stars she vanished (or perhaps the moonlight brought her out in me) and there was nothing laid before you but a doll to be ravaged and disassembled for parts. I had never been touched quite so possessively nor enclosed in a strength like yours. You told me I was beautiful and kissed me on the orange merry-go-round as it lazily spun just as drunkenly as my world. My life passed from between the lips you parted with your tongue to slide phlegmatic down your throat.

I tremble as you impart automated affection onto my cheek each morning, bidding your dutiful spouse goodbye (occasionally murmuring an 'I love you' that I am utterly desperate to trust). Often the lank snakes of white hair that slither to my chin come between my skin and yours, obstructing our meeting. Sometimes (when 'love me' plays like a ruined record to the beat of my heart) you tenderly tuck the filthy bleached locks behind my mouse-like ears and bestow my cheekbone with a proper kiss. But only sometimes. Undeveloped hands yank at your fingers as you in turn tug the sleeves of your starched white shirt down to conceal the maps of ink that spread like a cancer over your flesh. 'Daddy, daddy, hug me, hug me!', they beg. My frail hands fumble with the child that rides my right hip, clutching onto her as she reaches in vain for the love she will never have. Children were never your forte once the initial joy had passed. Five pecks to the motley crew of mismatched siblings later and the door scratches closed (for the frame is frayed from a past break-in and never quite shuts) amidst the din of bickering brothers and their shrill younger sister. A box of cereal scatters across the floor as John and Nicki pursue it with furious competition. I remain silent, for I have long ago surrendered my license to discipline.

I muse each night as I brush my teeth on whether she would have been given any better. Perhaps it is true that you have never cared for me as more than a stand-in for her face. From the back, the side, a distance, or a blurred photograph I am her doppelganger. I sacrificed myself and all I had built just to be there for you. This is what we do for those we love, which neither you nor her had ever done for one another. Yet you needed her clinical replacement for some undiagnosed psychosis and I complied, although I knew your flesh was still hanging on her nails. I convinced myself at your subliminal urging that I was to marry you not for the replication of a nightmare she had fled from but because you gave of yourself as I did unto you. Maybe she would have been treated just as unduly as I. One can never estimate the actions of the heart, let alone one such as yours.

A single stronghold of the past lies fortified beneath the bed, tucked into a corner where it conceals itself behind shoeboxes filled with unused condoms (what married couple needs those when there is no gamble on pregnancy?) and packs of cigarettes that we were forced to abandon for the sake of filling smoldering fissures in our finances. Within the castle of storybook history there wafts up a stale stench of strawberry chapstick and spicy aftershave, coiled like a dozing serpent over shiny magazine covers and Mac cosmetics that have in all likelihood expired. A bat belt buckle grows dusty and coarse within its wrappings of skeleton-patterned gloves and I dare not slide my hands into those fraying cotton costumes no matter how I ache to do so. I believe I hear the fast-paced drumbeat and far off clamor of three guitars if I press my ear to the mattress hard enough, a memory of 10,000 fists pumping in the air and your body pressing needy and wet against mine beneath the stage lights. 'Didn't you used to be a Rock Star, Mama?', John questions with eager eyes as if begging me to play archaeologist. I do not bear an answer as I search my mind for an account of my musical career to tell as a bedtime story. It is merely a sea-spray of light, sound, and heat with no definitive form. My respiratory system wheezes far too much to hold a note. At times I fear I have forgotten what a human being looks like, let alone the love of a crowd

I allow myself fifteen minutes of self-indulgence each afternoon during naptime, certain that Camden (who is my mirror of eight years) can conduct his twin brothers for a quarter of an hour. He is vivacious and patient and brimming with promises of sunlight in cemeteries, golden in his loose honey curls and apple-green eyes. The child is the very wraith of my past self stepped from photographic crypts to parade across the coffee table singing with his too-long limbs flailing in time to a ghostly memory. I claim sanctuary in the bathroom that is the sole lock-endowed compartment of our miserable clapboard-framed hovel. My position alternates between pressing against the mirror (leaving smears of body oil which only contribute to the fog of too many attempts at toothpaste finger-painting) and curled in the corner like a sorrowful armadillo. The tiles are chipped by too many reckless toilet-plunger vampire hunters and I reflect in bitterness that it is your genes that have made the twins such hooligans. My son and daughters (ours, I claim, but only in my precarious reality) are shy and careful but your sons are dauntingly vocal and hell-bent on destroying every wall that imprisons them. I touch the faded pink quadrangles (once squares) and sob all the more in earnest as the sharp bones of my knees prick at the undefended veins that curl inside thin arms. I feel as if I am a pitiful Cinderella in reverse, once the belle of the ball and now a faded flyer that has been torn from its pole by the seasons. The mirror reflects my pitiable image back to me; hair once gloriously thick now thinning with stress and still bleached the yellow-white of bone, pallid skin stretched too tightly over my structure to allow wrinkles, my full lips chapped by the lack of fluids to be had (our tapwater is not drinkable and I would rather keep my babies hydrated than myself), cheekbones jutting out from beneath my eyes too sharply to be attractive, and a body once soft and feminine turned malnourished and physically depressed. I lower my head and allow the hair I have spent my life hiding behind envelope the ghastly truth. No wonder we question if you love me any longer.

I am ostracized from the contemporary world with my constants: my dysfunctional house, my bills, my messes, and our children. Friends take the form of stuffed animals and insects I graciously crush with shoes, never homo sapien vertebrates that speak with syllables and visit on weekends. My brother I have no contact with and for all I know he is owner of a million-dollar music enterprise and toting twelve children beside his personal Paris Hilton (or perhaps he is living humbly with a woman far kinder than Sandra and they are content to be childless). When Dominique bid me leave you before I made a decision I would regret I was presented with a set of scales on which to weigh the two composites of my universe. Callisto against Dominique. The love of my life against my life-long love. Lover to brother. I chose your promises and am still attempting to determine whether I regret it. And as much as my self-made family is my justification for breathing I am lonely in Antarctica. I imagine in silent exchanges of understanding that only Emily can sympathize, for she too once had a twin (once, in deliberate past tense). Elena was taken from her (and I, their mourning mother) in infancy yet still she reaches in slumber for the companion that will never materialize. Just as I grasp for Dominique in the dead of night and find only dwarfish plump Nicki drooling on my collarbone. I wonder if others have ceased to include me in their nightly prayers and if Mama says 'my son' rather than 'my sons'. Sometimes I fancy penning letters but fear you will find the return correspondence and gaze at me with that raw hurt in your ethereal amber depths. You know which hurt; the emotion that makes my heart commit suicide every time I see it.

“No, Jack! Put her down!” Camden pleads, reaching for John's captive as the hellion twins elude him.

“Catch me, Camden! I'm faster than you!” John jeers, passing the small animal off to Nicki over the battered back of the sofa.

“John... Nicki..., put Hermione down this instant.” I warn, my head immersed in the fridge as I seek the Soy cheese that has seemingly vanished (most likely into Nicki's stomach).

Scowling, One-Of-Two releases the calico kitten and Hermione darts from the room in rambunctious flight. The twins are so filled with malcontent that I can only love them utterly. I know what malcontent in a child foretells. They will grow to be blazing-tempered yet astonishingly gentle when they choose, insanely devout and passionate as a tsunami, the first to throw a punch and the last to go down. Just like you. Just like you, Callie.

“You're so mean to her! You know what they do to mean little boys in the afterlife? They turn them into puppy dogs and send them off to India. They eat dogs in India!” Camden shouts, letting fly a pillow that strikes one of the twins (I am not certain which) in the belly.

“Indias eat doggies, Mama?” Emily asks me in petrification, hazel eyes round as she struggles to comprehend.

“All cultures have different foods they eat, sugar.” I respond, petting her hair as I set a bag of spinach on the countertop. “Don't worry, though. We won't eat Vinny, Soldier, Magenta, or Dumbledore.”

She appears comforted by my words and retrieves the colander from its cabinet.

“MAMA! CAMDEN'S GONNA EAT US!” John shrills, his tiny compact fists swinging precariously close to his older brother's freckled nose.

“There will be no cannabilism in my house. Camden is eating carrots and soy quesadilla, as will you two terrorists. And we aren't in India, thank god.”

From the refrigerator I extract a saran-wrapped clump of tortillas, bypassing the Soy Milk that appears to have expired with a brief acknowledgment that I must throw it out. The odors of past spills and rotten food assault my nostrils and I swallow past the bile that threatens to crawl up my throat. Shut the door, save it for later. I begin cutting the components of our lunch as John screams again and I envision my irritation being diced as the spinach folds beneath my knife. One, two, five, eight, seven, three, four, six, nine, ten... One, three, seven, six, four, five, two, nine, ten, eight... I maintain calm amongst the bedlam. As always.

“Mama, I want to have Chef Boyardi like Collin! Collin gets good food!” Nicki pipes up, appearing at my left elbow with pleading amber eyes.

“No, honey. That stuff is awful for you. And Daddy explained to you already that we eat different from most people.”

“Yeah, I know, but do we always have to be Beagan? Don't we get Fridays off?”

“Vegan. And yes, we have to. Think of all the poor animals they abuse to make cheese and milk and meat.”

Unshaken by my irrefutable logic, the plump child slinks off to antagonize another innocent victim.

“Meh! Meh!” Olivia whines from her place beside my right ankle, her fragile arms groping for my embrace.

A sharp throb begins to curl behind my eyes and I draw a deep breath to steady myself. My back has gone out again but a mother never allows such obstructions to the children’s whims. I bend to retrieve Olivia from the water-damaged linoleum as Soldier trots into view with his tongue bounding three inches ahead of him.

“No, Soldier, you don't want spinach stems.” I reprimand gently, flicking my fingers at the salivating canine.

Soldier whimpers and nudges his ancient, war-scarred head against my calf in insistence. Olivia clumsily seizes a scrap of vegetable stem from the cutting board and tosses it into the air. The dog pursues it gleefully while I shake my head at my naïve infant daughter. Perhaps for Christmas I will buy a box of dog treats for our canine pets and a package of catnip for the three cats that display comparatively better behavior.

“Meh, meh! Weaf!” Olivia babbles, collecting spinach stems and presenting them to me.

I summon a smile and kiss the side of her downy head, taking her findings and depositing them in the garbage can near the back door. My stomach turns as the stench of trash that ought to have been disposed of much earlier twines about my esophagus like ivy and I swallow with difficulty. I can smell sour Soy Milk and the sickly dregs of vegetables, rank Tofu and moldering bread. The sensation of nausea does not ease and I set Olivia on the crumb-littered countertop so that I may turn to vomit into the scummy sink. I grip the steel tightly with bitten-down black nails and silently implore my stomach to hold its contents.

“Nickiiiiiii!” John wails, accompanied by the crash of a chair overturning.

A stab of pain impales like a railroad spike to my skull and I surrender. Scarlet-laced, empty regurgitation trickles into the maw of the pipes as I seek an old cup of juice among the dirty dishes to wash it down with (as the utilities company has shut off our water again).

“Mama sick!” Emily sympathizes, her three-year-old arms looping easily about my emaciated leg.

I have located a cup of cranberry juice and shake it over the sharp repugnance of my mess, pressure ebbing as my daughter continues to impress her concern onto my bare limbs. My brain registers that I can hear Olivia fussing and I rush to tend to her. Where have gone the days when you worked from home (a lovely, two-story home with wide windows and light fixtures that functioned) and we sang to the radio as together we cooked lunch? We were only parenting Camden and the then-infant twins in those days. Before you began to sour beneath the surface. Before Elena was born and then lost. Before you ceased to so much as pretend to love me.

“MAMA!” Camden shrieks.

I wish I were able to sit down for a moment.

Screams, shouts, the thud of objects denting walls does not have the opportunity to echo. It was a familiar prerequisite of your rampages that would end in you seizing me and whispering so thick and desperate 'You're mine. Mine. Always and forever. Mine.' into the tremulous shell of my ear. I suspected that perhaps I longed to provoke you, to rouse a reaction and the bitter moments of possessiveness that followed. You frighten me when angered, a scorpion coiled to sting, but my addictive personality has conceived a dependence on the time when I feel a semblance of your long-archived ardor for me. I lay my head against your strong shoulder and close my eyes to all that has transpired. For a moment that hangs in spider-silk balance I am twenty-four years old and you are (not my first but surely) my greatest love of a wiser twenty. Your fingers delicately caress my hair and it is thick and tangled and perhaps golden (or black or magenta or red or turquoise) and I am a silly Art-School graduate fumbling around the nymph that has made off with my more than just my heart. But then a sniffling child intrudes upon my memory and you withdraw as I usher our partial offspring back to bed. There are only these quarrels once a week or so, yet they have the tendency to impede upon all the days in-between. I do not identify whether I dread or anticipate them. The blows do not scar and are always soothed by occasional taking of the hand or kisses pressed to skin for no visible purpose. You have never hit me. Not outright, at the least. There has been the sharp raps to the back of the head that are born more out of our peculiar companionship than maliciousness, at times a seizing of my arms and shaking until my head snaps weakly on its axis, or pinning my slighter structure against the wall as your amber gaze lights paths of flame in my skin. Yet you have never struck me, of course, because for all your additional rights due to our matching genders I am still your woman and you are no wife beater. But I know you want to. Sometimes, I am convinced that if I raised my head and met your gaze I would feel the skin darken in my shoulder or belly. You would not split my lips (you like them just as they are) nor conceal my pretty apple-colored eyes with provoked blood but the blow would have come to the places no other will see if I had been any less weak. I was always so unstrung in regards to you. My beautiful, fervent Callie whom I had submitted to so rapidly. Perhaps your fists never touched me because you never had to smack me about to gain your rightful place as man of the house. You knew you had had me since 'hello'.

It is not as if we are strangers. We are fully aware of the small pleasures and eccentricities of one another's bodies. The map known as 'Callie' is yellowing with age and mine must be the same to your eyes; long past memorization or unpredictability. Yet why, why must this be so hard?

“Please.” You plead, features veiled by lust and misjudged angle save for the trembling wet surface of your lips parted to pant.

Out of context this word would have been an urging, a primal submission to the gluttony of carnality with room for every orgasmic whim. But here, in this bed and this time, it is not. You are begging as your pride would never otherwise allow for the release that will not come. The uninhibited tongue demands things from my body that will not arrive prettily packaged in sweat and sated sighs. Tears shimmy down to pool behind my ears as I lunge after the memory of a lovemaking fulfilled. Of days past when I was not merely a receptacle of your masculine domination and semblance of duty. When this tardy intimacy was about expression, not grasping like drowning men at the tides carrying away something we once called 'love'. But there is nothing and I feel hollow (though in all truth I am filled by flesh and heat). And you sob and strike the headboard with your fist as semen spills inside me, for once again we have failed one another and even the sensation of completion is merely the shards of the empty egg shell. You collapse beside me and lash at your pillow as you had the oak above us while emitting a frustrated, strangled sound that repeats the sentiments of weeping. The distant pain of a need never satisfied coils inside my lower body and I turn onto my side in silence, all at once alarmingly chill and sapped of all energy. I can see you no more from this angle and instead I watch the strobe of stagnant yellow headlights lancing through the small, high window of this cell. I am so afraid of the dark but dare not reach for your comforting presence (which has not been soothing since we were engaging in tragic adultery). We shout at one another from opposite sides of the chasm but the echoes are lost amongst rocky graves and gravity.

“I love you.” I whisper instead, as if these words could recollect the dead skin cells that is the dust of our marriage.

I receive no reply but a small, bitter laugh.

The smell of something burning awakens me from an uneasy doze, my senses flooded by awareness and the suffocating heat of a fever. I moan and roll my head in the vague direction of the door, concerned but only partially capable of lucid thought. What have I missed while I am confined to this bed? One can never trust the culinary skills of pre-teens. I had experienced this firsthand at an early age. Are my children on the verge of destroying the house? Before my worry overwhelms me a fit of hacking seizes my lungs and I seek the bowl beside my bed to deposit the thick phlegm. I can nearly feel the fluid slosh inside my lungs like the buildup of leaking plumbing. The world is orange and blurred and I cannot seem to breathe around the watery sensation.

“Here, Mama.” Emily’s soft voice soothes, and her broad hands are gripping the bowl as I choke ghastly fluid into the embracing pottery.

When I have coughed up a considerable amount of liquid bacteria I sink back toward the pillows, shivering beneath the pile of blankets. I am burning alive yet Goosebumps rise in my skin, speckled with sweat and soaked in infection.

“Camden’s making lunch. No fire, don’t worry.” My daughter informs me, tucking the covers further about my shoulders.

I feel powerless and dismal for the second time in as many months. Surrender has never been a feature of my personality and I am digging my grave with stubborn over-exertion. Falling ill is quickly becoming habit and this I can not accept nor cosset.

“Tongue.” Emily orders into my thoughts, and I see she is wielding my friend the thermometer.

I can only obey in this weakened state and allow her to jab the long instrument beneath my tongue. My breathing grows more labored as my mouth stays shut in preparation of diagnosis and I wonder if perhaps I will asphyxiate at this very moment, leaving my five children to char their meals and run amok. Dear god! Beep beep announces the thermometer and it slides from the mucus-laden cavern of my jaws. Emily is poor at numbers yet regards the reading with concentration before assuring me that she will deliver this directly to her eldest brother.

“Be right back, Mama. I love you.” Emily tells me, and I croak out an affirmative that means to be ‘I love you, too’.

The child vanishes from my sight and I attempt to settle. Every muscle seems to be cinched and each joint the target of repetitive stabbing. Heat rakes the surface of my skin and I can scarcely stand to touch to sheets. I loathe this. Feverishly, my mind wanders off in search of something alternative to misery. My eyes shut… and I wonder why pneumonia is spelled with a ‘p’.

“Callisto?” I ask, hesitantly.

I am standing at a crossroads, the entrance to your sanctum that I dare not trespass upon uninvited. You glance up from your notepad with pencil poised to configure numbers lower than my self-esteem. I am struck by the beauty of your soft-edged jaw and cerebral autumn eyes so delicately caressed by the dim bulb of the desk lamp. My pride retreats down the slick recesses of my esophagus and I allow the adoration I still feed with ancient concert tickets and haphazard love notes to swell like blood in my eyes.

“Yes, Réme? What is it?” You ask in the low, intense tone that has been the voice in the back of my mind for years.

“It's... um... April.”

A temporary coughing fit overtakes my verbiage and when I recover you are watching expectantly. I massage my taut chest and say nothing more as I await a retort.

“Yeah. I know.” You reply cordially at length, jaw tightening with suppressed irritation at what you assume to be another of my unwarranted remarks.

The hand that wields the pencil twitches as if it has already discarded the importance of this conversation. I am aware that you have financial matters to attend to, as I am utterly useless when it comes to practicalities, yet my own selfish smoldering for attention is consuming my internal organs. The fire has bypassed my liver to snake through my intestines and I must find relief before I combust.

“Fifteenth. April fifteenth.” I clarify, knuckles white as I worry the frayed edge of your decaying red t-shirt.

For a moment a ghost of confusion passes over your eyes like stormclouds before your sweet mouth opens in recognition.

“Oh.”

You straighten, setting down the pencil, and I think that perhaps this alone was all that I needed.

“Happy birthday, baby. You're... jesus, are you forty-two?” You marvel, truly looking at me for the first time in days.

I wince at the jarring number and nod reluctantly, ashamed of the laugh lines that split the flesh at my eyes and the fading satin of my skin.

“Damn. You're getting old.”

My lower lip catches between my teeth and is pressed hard, an anger at myself rearing high. Your gaze scans me bone-bearingly sharp and I shift in nervous anticipation of some sort of degrading remark. Yet instead you rise from behind the desk and shuffle toward me at the doorframe. You pause before me contemplatively and I wonder if you have shrunk, for I do not recall being more than four inches the loftier. The material of your polyester-blend shirt is stretched to suggest a growing belly as I look down at you from this angle and I reflect that it is not only I that has become rough about the edges. My breath is snared as your hands raise slowly, unobtrusively, until the palms meet mine. Our fingers intertwine as you gaze up into my face and I wonder if I will crumble to ash on your fingertips, perhaps become caught beneath your nails and picked away when you sit at your desk waiting for the lunch hour. But your amber disks are not asking for my soul or my absence.

Instead you murmur, “For forty-two, you're still so beautiful.”

Emboldened by this infrequent intimacy I close the inches of height difference between our lips. Your lip ring has been missing for some time yet I swear I can feel its cold metal bite when you respond just as tenderly.

A window splinters and cold autumn air spits ice at my undefended neck. I do not flinch as the glass shards take flight in all directions, littering our bedroom floor like so many pieces of my sanity.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?! Why didn’t you tell me about this?!” You are screaming, the bedpost ringing with the impact of your kick.

“How was I supposed to?! Walk up to you and say ‘Hi honey, welcome home. The kids are so difficult to handle when I’m sick all the time, but I don’t need any help. Oh, and by the way, I have lung cancer.’” I respond desperately with a hoarse fragility.

My fingers clutch into my hair rigidly as I rock back and forth in agitation.

“Réme, we’ve got five children! They need you!” You continue, seizing my brittle arm and hauling me to my feet.

“You think this was a choice, Callisto?! That I decided I would volunteer for cancer? Those are my babies!” I cry out, ignoring the firmness of your grip and shouting back in your face.

I begin to cough, putrid sputum rising in my throat as you persist railing.

“They’re my babies too! Just because I don’t spend much time with them doesn’t mean they don’t mean the world to me! All I ever wanted was to have a family. Granted, it fucking worked out like Frankenstein’s monster, but those kids are my entire world!”

Your eyes are the size of platters and you seem to be on the verge of hysteria, as if I can summon the will to purge my organs of their malignancy on command. My breaking point has been breached and I am bawling like a child.

“Your entire world? Who’s the primary caregiver? Who has spent every waking moment with them since each was in the womb? I may be a man, but I’m their fucking mother. You made this monster, Doctor Frank. You fucked your best friend and married him when your good little Italian girl ran off. It was you who arranged for your parents’ fantasy scheme to become reality. I’m your wifey because you chose me.”

Your gaze blazes and the first prick of sincere fear lances through my veins.

“I NEVER FUCKING WANTED YOU!”

My breath is strangled in my throat. The muscles work but my mouth has become too dry to fathom swallowing. Stillness descends on me like the Grim Reaper and slowly, achingly so, comprehension of what you have declared dawns across your features. Vertigo collides with my right temple and I sway, and perhaps you do as well for now your face is buried in my neck and you are sobbing wretchedly. My arms are being crushed by your clinging limbs, caged between our heartbeats and the mingled sodium of our tears. I think our sorrow will give birth to a deformed fidelity.

“Why? Why, honey?” You plead.

I don’t know, my love. What answer am I to give to a chain of ill-fated events? I stare at the ceiling vacantly, feeling disconnected with my body and immersed in the consuming unreality of this moment. I know that I will die, for this has been too long left untreated. Death I do not fear. It is the separation from you and my babies that pulverizes my heart to a fine dust.

“Réme, what am I supposed to do without you? How can I live without you? You… you’re… you’re the only thing that has never left me. You’ve always been there.”

I know that I am your only constant. When you flew into a rage for some insignificant reason, when you were having a sour day and no one dared to approach you, I took you into my arms and weathered your furious attempts at rejection.

“You should have told me. We could have stopped it. I take care of you and you of me. It’s just the way things work, remember?”

You held my hair back and I held you up. United we stand, divided we fall.

“You can’t go. I won’t let you go.”

No, Callie. You never could let me go.

Another candle for another year I light along the windowsill. I cup my hand about the frail flame as it wavers, preserving its luminescence with the barricade of my skin. A minor draft that leaks through a towel-filled gap between the window and frame, stroking at my hands. The line of wax figures are headed by a pair of tapered candles (one black and the other red) before proceeding down the row of white and blue votives. This season we kindle the white votive that represents Olivia's first Christmas.

“I saw Mama kissing Santa Claus!” John sings with his siblings, cranking up the dial on our battered CD player.

I smile in amusement at their unhindered joy of the holiday and leave the candles to flicker. When I turn, my over-sized sweater rustling about my slight frame, you are twirling Emily across the carpet in tune to the music. Christmas is a magical time for us, as it holds the most pure of our memories. Our first Yule after marriage had been a time of relief for you, a burden discarded in favor of the temporary high of newlyweds. You still thrive best in its spiced graces. A flush is in your cheeks and the poised stinger has been temporarily laid to rest. A sick feeling twists inside me as you seize Camden and hold him tight, smooching his cheek despite his protests of ‘Daddy, no slobbering!’. I remember two young boys doing the same so many years into the past. Two blond children, one tubby and the other gangling, the taller of the two screeching as his elder sibling pressed kisses all over his face beneath the stockings. The packages beneath the tree are scarce in my new home yet we are not lacking in festive mood any more than my family did when I myself was a kid.

“Réme! Quick, find some mistletoe!” You shout jubilantly.

Another recollection ignites like a flashbulb behind my eyes and again I see blond dreadlocks and piercings that have long since departed. Here is the underage punk rock urchin that had once pinned me to a wall beneath the honorary kissing plant and kept me there for half an hour as only the young have the stamina to do. Such a foolish game, it was. Perhaps we are better off disillusioned.

You and I are the outcome of being cheap. You should not have been thrifty, Callie, and perhaps you would not have bought a voodoo doll at half-price. You and I are the leftovers in the back of the fridge; a succulent meal grown rotten and forgotten. You and I are what ensues when best friends dabble in too much passion and too little requite. You and I were always meant to be but somehow deluded ourselves and were born lovers under an erroneous constellation. You and I are the corpus delicti of fame like the falling doves inked into your hipbones. I was born in a neighborhood where killers wore Batman pajamas and woman advertised the phrase ‘open for business’ across their groins. Ultimately, I died in the same conditions to which I was yielded by my mother’s uterus. I waited so long for the second chance I was never given.

My last breathe was taken from a place that no one ought to live and yet everyone does. Because, dearly beloved, we all die alone in the end.

R.I.P.