Free American Masculine by Shann Ray Page B

landscapes, like mountains and plateaus, steppes, flatlands, canyons, coulees, each tiny movement irregular and divergent, flawed as the texture of skin.
    Love, she recalls, heals all.
    Deception, she reasons. Her face is slick. She covers her face with her hands, covers her head. She hasn’t seen herself for weeks, won’t look, and would like never to look again.
    He visits each morning and when she hears his step at the door she tries to gather herself to meet him at the kitchen table. There he serves her tea and she says little, but she sees how he looks at her, peering in as if through a veil. Since the hospital she’s drawn her hair down over her eyes, and always she imagines her daughters. She wishes she had died with them. Not instead of them. One or the other. Together. Life or death. Not this. She imagines their lips and small faces, their voices as they pretended and played, their laughter. She would touch them with her fingertips, kiss and caress each face, reassure and speak good words, speak gratitude.
    In the hospital she asked, Where’s the car?
    Sold it, he said. Bought you a truck.
    Upon her release he removed the mirrors from her apartment without a word. His responsiveness seemed silly, so unlike him, and today when he parts her hair to find her face, she barely sees the curve of his chin as he peers in while she stares down at the linoleum, gold flecks scattered in strange patterns from her bare feet to the wall. His daily kindness is ridiculous, she thinks. Grace never his strong suit.
    Each morning near ten he stops by and if she is not yet up, and she is rarely up, he calls to her from the kitchen. And if she is asleep or half-numb he goes to her room and sits at her bedside and touches her shoulder then places his hand on her head. He draws the hair back from her forehead. Runs his fingers through her hair, his own awkward too delicate motion. It is good to see you, he says.
    With her eyes closed she wants to believe him. No ill will. In fact, he had offered to stay with her, an extended stay, but she refused. She’s glad she did; her skin thin as cellophane. Whenever she goes about town, the whole world seems to look at her and want to weep, and she feels forced to take from them the invisible bottles that contain their grief, while she must be silent until she returns home and lays flat on her back on the living room floor, the bottles like illumined glass around her body in the dim light, her own tears like dark rivers running out from her forever.
PANEL III
    A YEAR. Two.
    Weight like a flock of crows clutching ledges in her room, bedposts, chair backs, black bodies angular at the foot of her bed, some flapping, some still. People see, but can’t speak, propped up, anesthetized. She’ll do as she pleases. She’ll go wherever she damn well pleases. In the bathroom she lies on the floor. Cold tile. Her hand reaches, touches the base of the toilet. Porcelain. Everything is gone.
    Morning again. In bed, she sees her father walk through the doorway. Notices him. Here again he has sad eyes. His habit of touching two fingers to his temple. Putting his hands through his hair. He’ll be fine. She wonders what will greet her. Nothingness, or tenderness. She isn’t afraid. He won’t like another funeral but she can’t worry about him. Water and form, existence. She is formless, she is form without burden or breath, her bones translucent, dark color at the center, like stones under ice.
    WHEN HE GOES, she walks to the kitchen. Clothed in an ankle-length cotton nightgown, off-white, she takes her keys from the coffee table, walks down the stairs and out through the parking lot to the numbered stall where she parks her truck. From the space behind the seat she lifts a fresh green garden hose, walks to the back of the truck, threads one end into the tailpipe, the other into the thin opening she makes in the passenger side window. She takes the driver’s seat, turns the ignition, reclines, breathes,