. . . . . . .

[from Utter: part ii]


-9

When he wakes every light in the house is on. He crosses through the study into the living room to look for her but she is neither on the couch nor sleeping in the blue arm chair as he expects. He turns to the dining room where he finds her body splayed in a wooden chair beside the oak table. She wears a full black slip. Her panties are pushed down around her ankles. She is barefoot. Her throat has been cut with the knife discarded on the table beside the melons, also cut open, that spill their slick black seeds into chunks of red flesh and juice. A bolt of white silk runs through the melons, back into the kitchen, forth into the entryway down the stairwell and out into the street. Her poem is written into the silk, he realizes, and he begins to shake, for he cannot take care of this, all of this, and he backs into the bedroom to pray, where when he wakes, every light in the house is on. He crosses through the study into the living room to look for her but she is neither on the couch nor sleeping in the blue arm chair.

***