Gone
A woman waits for someone who will never return, in an apartment she can never leave.
Content warning: This story contains depictions of child death, as well as suicide.
Waking
She is gone by time I peel open my crusty eyes and stretch my creaking bones and shake off the mothball dust of sleep and shuffle my aching bare feet into the kitchen where piles of rotting dishes with piles of seedless fruit and half-devoured sandwich carcasses line the stained countertops in a grisly mountain range. She is gone by time dawn cracks open its egg of light, oozing canary-yellow goo across the gray clouds shaped like blustery clawed chicken feet.
She is gone even though the shape of her remains, her still-wrinkled clothes hanging hollow-boned and crooked in her closet—only her suitcase displaced.
She is gone without her sandals that idle by the front door, longing to feel complete by the expanse of her wide-toed feet. She is gone even as cockroaches skitter up, over, through, and down their now permanent mountain range, nibbling the sour-sweet vegetation, antennae twitching as they catch wind of my moans and witness the quaking of my shoulders.
She is gone still as I wait on the couch, chewed nails unraveling loose threads until cotton puff entrails spill out of the couch’s ribcage, falling to the floor in a rain of white like the noise of our late afternoon argument, when she shook her head and her long hair rustled like stiff and starchy funeral clothes.
She is gone still when I remember to tell her that I didn’t intend to misplace her—I only wanted to consume the plum-fresh sweetness of her laughter.
She is gone still by time night shutters across the windows, and I fall asleep, fall awake, fall asleep, fall awake, and I wait.
