The house looms sepulchral into the starless night, stretching higher the longer I kneel in the snow. I rip down the police tape so the neighbors don’t ask more questions that already brew. I stare into the house’s closed eyes, as dark as douted candles. An influenzal seedling grows in my throat that I will not drown with water. Each percussive cough hurts more than the last, inching him closer to clawing his way from where he houses in my chest.
The front door opens with the groan of waking joints into a kitchen that’s turned unrecognizable. The floor is a muddy and salty mess I will not clean. I kick the welcome mat over the pattern left by their footprints, throw my keys onto the table with a clatter I will not acknowledge; I don’t lock the door behind me. My breath comes out hollow as the wisps of cigarettes he used to smoke and I will not turn on the oven to warm the house. The dirty dishes from his last meal sit in the sink and I will not move to wash them, instead pitching them onto the linoleum. I drag my knees across the floor to collect each skipped shard one by one, ‘til I cut my palms and fingertip, and bleed maple.
The lights are on and I will not turn them off. The coffee table has been pushed towards the windows and I will not center it. His side of the couch still holds his form. Another cough expels in a cloud of his ectoplasm and cold saliva. They were kind enough to close his bedroom door when they finished cataloging his crime scene. It is so final, so full of shame; he is dead, yet I’m the ghost. The gentle rasp of that door against his hard carpet sounds as it should and relieves me to the point of finally crying.
A skeletal sliver of moonlight creeps in through the edges of the blackouts curtains drawn over the windows. They were kind enough to lay a top sheet over the his bloodstain at the foot of his bed. The residual smell of gun smoke stifles the air. I line the broken glass on the entryway and kneel on the glass ‘til it digs through my pants leg and pierces my skin with the touch of silken moss. I clasp my hands together to atone into the darkness, feed myself on the blood from cuts until I am sated and toothached. He materializes in the corner, face to the wall and still as a stain-glass icon. Another cough catches and chokes, and comes out as a sputter.
As my eyes adjust to this darkness, it is just his hoodie, lifelessly flung onto the coat rack that shares his slender frame.