After three weeks of traveling in opposite directions, we arrived again in the same hotel.
Repeating conversations, we worked in a circle. The maybe-we-shouldn’ts and we-can-start-overs.
A quick, it-hasn’t-worked-before dismissed by another this-time-will-be-different.
A bottle of wine, “Do Not Disturb” sign, and once again we were back in bed.
Three days later, between breakfast and the shower, we were arguing again. Signs of dismay were settling in across my forehead and around your mouth. When the shouting ended, you went to brush your teeth, running the water to drown me out. I opened the door for room service breakfast and found Love dead on the doorstep, naked and blue across the Sunday Paper.
I picked it up, all baby fat and sad feathers, and put it in the bathtub with some ice and cold cokes. I closed the shower curtain. You spat in the sink and rinsed and sighed. Who knew disappointment could be so minty fresh? We went back to the sitting room, deciding what to do.
I picked at the breakfast, the grapefruit and toast. Your poured cream into your coffee, watching it star and cloud. We sat in Sunday Edition silence. When I got to the personals, there was a pathetic, watery cough from the bathroom and you looked up in a panic.
"We shouldn’t try to save it. It will just come back a zombie."
"Yes, and it will eat our brains. The only good bits we have left!"
There are aching holes where our hearts used to be. We pulled our hotel bathrobes closed and tied the white terry cloth belts in tight knots.
We decided to bury it. You pulled it out of the bathtub, all icy and wet, somehow smaller than before, though pregnant with death. I dried it off with the hotel towels and the feathers started falling out from between the chubby shoulders. We folded it up and wrapped in the used newspaper. You built a little coffin and, fearful of zombification, we dug a deep hole on the county line to make sure it would stay put.
Crossroads would have been better, sure, but they’re paved over these days, or already filled up. Secure prisons for devils, werewolves, imps, and jinns, rockstars, suicides, and other wicked creatures.
We chopped off its head and stuffed it with garlic. You drove a spike of oak straight through for good measure. I asked if we should burn it too, and you said no, ashes scatter.
"The right gust of wind and it could get into our eyes and mouths, good God, and then what?"
It all went into the box: baby fat and feathered wings and garlic and oak stake and Sunday Edition. The box went into the ground and the ground was laced with salt. It wouldn’t come back again. There would be no resurrection. No Lazarus tricks. No fourth, or fifth, or sixteenth coming.
“Good and dead and put to bed, stake through its heart, garlic in its head!” we said, 3 times, and spat like gypsies. Then we covered it over and patted the dirt down hard and tight.
Now that it’s done, and the knees of our pants are sodden with dew, and our fingers blue with cold and painful with the dirt pinching under our nails, we stand here in Burial silence. You fidget with the loose thread of your sweater, like always, and stupidly, I notice, just like always. You tuck a loose curl behind my ear, and leave a smudge of dirt down my right cheek. I rock back on my heels and look up at the stars. There is no moon.
So what next? Being finally rid of it, the world should feel different. Your eyes should become duller. I should notice the ragged stupidity in the strings of your sweater. But somehow, nothing’s changed at all. Just a small, sad mound of earth raised up on the county line, roughly the size and shape of a lunchbox, and the raw dirt aching under our fingernails.
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