Whose hands now guide our hips? What nothing in our ear fashioned arrows of mistletoe when we stumbled through the door? To where do they travel? How true their love of velocity as they whistle through our hair? Had I such resolve I might never write again. Strangle the would-be. Here is a life to lead full of promise and paychecks. Here is a future. A family. A history of madness. A crease in the heart to still us. Sudden. Quiet.

The story should have gone any other way. There is a stain where his name used to be. She has removed her fourth rib--punctured her skin to draw out the ink with a quill. She leaves paper bruised with the weight of her words and inadvertently leaks secrets which her sheets absorb as she turns in her sleep. Her child will often cry beside her without knowing why. Quiet. Quiet.