His Body

in the ER, on the gurney, white-sheeted, not yet cold. I fall on him. The husk of him. Still beautiful, that body. Long, lean, pleasingly hirsute.

I love your fur, I’d used to giggle, stroking an arm, a leg.

The nurses, the orderly, the so-young doctor recede, a sucking-back my skin registers: their gaze peeling off, leaving us alone together. Á deux, again but anew. No longer me and him—we, hard-won, triumphant—but me and his body emptied of him, his capacious, arrhythmic heart having stopped and refused to re-start.

I feel into it, this new state of us: him dead, me alive. I stare, tears rivering. His eyes are closed, as if for the first time ever he sleeps soundly. I take a photo of his dead face, then another from a different angle, a forensic effort to seed in me truth I do not want to see.