You remember when he said you were beautiful, a clean thing that would save him. You were both running towards the Alligator Aquarium on the waterfront. There was a small open shaft on the roof, he said, easy to slip through.
The woman in my closet is watching me again. Flash of white through the folded door, crisp linen tea dress, fascinator, prim buttoned gloves. I laugh. That was never me.
Mom and HerBoyfriendChip say we got this house real cheap because something bad happened here. Before we go in, us kids ask if it’s haunted, and Mom says even if chairs stack themselves and walls bleed, we’re better off living here than in that catpiss apartment with the Lopers.
I’m taking the kitchen table, because you don’t remember how we hauled it together in sweating harmony from the Queen’s Day secondhand market through the celebrating streets to our first home.
Sarah sat on the sofa, listening to her mother read, “It was an anxious moment for the watchers on the bridge. They looked and looked…”