Knock Wood

Maybe it’s the act of being with another that marks time, since it’s always seeping like rainwater into some unending ground.

Her mouth dry. Her limbs filled with lead. There would have been an IV taped into her arm, an embedded needle attached to a tube into which a clear liquid was dripping

It is none of our business.

So he would sleep little and when he slept, he would wake thinking he heard what he did not hear, what had once been a baby crying in the next room—when he had risen to comfort her, tiny helpless wisp in his arms, and she had rested her dark-haired head on his shoulder as he crooned low and walked back and forth, smoothed her shock of hair and patted her knobbed back, and when she fell asleep again, lifted her as gently as he could down into the crib, arranging the blankets so that she was warm, lowering her there onto her belly where she slept best and gazing for a moment at her slack mouth and pinpoint of a nose, listening for her milkweed breath, closing the door gently so that the hinges stayed silent and the bottom of the door could ease over the carpet, and let her sleep, he would wish, let her sleep.

It was none of his business. He would lie on his back as his head hummed and the pillow was like a sea in that it magnified the sounds, let his daughter’s screams travel in their slow deep way, resonate through the ear bones, resonate through the skull, carried in low frequency from the wild canyon of the mouth, from the throat’s vibrato cave. He could not be more haunted if the sounds were ghosts.

The time is out of joint

I alone knew the truth: that he was a human trapped in a purgatory built of his own fear of the world.