Victoria's coffin is lined with "crem-film", a plastic that stops her leaking,
but that burns in an environmentally friendly way.
_____
______
_____
_____
______
In an effort to attract the specific return I had wanted to my, our, home, by way of public invitation, I set fire to the house.
_______
It was an admittedly extreme way to go about things, parsing the practical from novelty in a way that reminded none too few of a teenagers mall-donned replicas of a punk-rock hairdo, an action that had all but lost its ability to warrant much of a response, one way or another.
_______
This was how we all kind of thought it would go down, some would say later.
________
I hurled broken molotovs deep into the room where the couch was around the time I would have normally been enjoying my first cocktail hour of the evening. He had always hated my cocktail hours, telling me that a lady like myself should know that two chardonnays would be plenty enough to shine.
_________
We had married shortly after we had met, in college, before our baccalaureates broached a future that we both found stilting, even somewhat sordid. We both worked middling careers, each in education, and spent the money we earned on buying things of his own personal preference. I spent a hidden sum on affairs with much younger students, his knowledge of which he kept hidden from me deep in the pockets of the couch like so many dimes and nickels.
_________
I remember the hernia he got when once trying to move the couch to a corner I thought was more conducive to conversation. He would lay there, unable to make it up the stairs, moaning all over his own defeat.
_______
I would sit there next to him, rubbing his feet to keep the blood moving, in silence aside from his grunts and cordial burbles.
_________
He left shortly after that. It was no one’s idea of a solution to the fix we had found ourselves in, but it was what I was left with.
________
Standing there, smiling at the smoke that was quickly making it difficult to see what was beyond me, past the open door, to his open arms upon arrival, I felt that hot tinge of regret that would often pass over me in times of hot weather when we would normally be on a beach somewhere in Nice.
______
This was a man I should have done everything in my power to make stay put, but simply pushed past me to a place where everything in the mirror of my misery looks so dead, so ashen. So lacking in life it could only be mine, alone.
_______
Truth be told, I merely wanted to torch the things he had left in the house when he left, now that he had left for good. I thought that the sight of his belongings burning might cause a sudden rise in him, cause him to run towards me & the house & his things, now in flames, fanning us all out with his arms, hands flayed wide like uselessly feathered wing-things.
_______
But he couldn’t see nor smell the smoke from where he was now; he would not be coming.
________
Everything would burn to the ground and be brushed up with volunteer brooms in the days that followed. Packed into plastic bags and tied together with twine of some sort. I, too, would be collected and thrown into sacks of varying contents and thrown into piles, one on top of the other, cradling us, all of us, like little pillows of pain.
_____
