All These Sunken Souls by Circe Moskowitz

Author:Circe Moskowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Your sister-cousin-soul does not understand the reverence you show to this palace of mine. You barely understand it yourself; but you understand this: when you cook at my hearth, it should be with the warmth and carefulness with which a priest approaches his pulpit. You keep the curtains closed to keep the sun out, to keep the cold in, to keep the world out, to keep us in.

Your mother calls. The shrill ring startles you from sleep. You do not get to bed again, shivering in the nest that you have made for yourself in the master bedroom, so far from the heart-h of me. So far from the stomach where I would keep you warm.

Your mother calls. You do not pick up. You listen to her voicemails though. I know the twitch of every expression.

“Vienna, darling, pick up. Pick up for me please. Your nana is gone. Everyone is gone. I cannot lose—We cannot lose each other. Vienna, darling, pick up. I would do anything for you to pick up.”

You do not smile when you hear her mourning your absence, begging you to take the communion of grief together. You do not understand the way she wails, the way she offers you cherry pies that you say that you cannot eat.

Your mother calls. Your phone no longer rings. Instead, you pickle the fallen fruit from the magnolia trees in the back and stay clear of the mausoleum and the cherries. You catch the fluffles of rabbits until there are few and skin them. You cook them in your nana’s red wine and fashion scarves from their skin.

The woman whose name you’ve stolen does not belong here. There is only you. Everywhere you step, the ghost of her body disappears until there is only you. Only us. And you are lovely, staring in the glass mirror, only relaxed when it is us, and all the water is running in the master bath. You are lovely when you cry so hard that you start to scream and the only reason you don’t shatter your fist in your own reflection is because you spit pink into the porcelain basin, your throat raw.

You stop. You dry your face. You continue your work of making me beautiful, you beautiful. Your sweat is in my foundations.

Sometimes, I think you can hear me. See me. Feel me. When you pass the door to the stomach, when you ignore the stairs up to the tower—the one that’s no longer leaning, not after the foreman and Youngblood and the messy rest straightened my spine. I won’t call out for you. That’s gauche, humiliating. I show my love in other ways.

There are no nightmares in this house, except the ones that come from the throat. There is no fear, not the kind you live with constantly, until you step past your driveway, where I cannot reach you. I let those heathens—the ones who walked my halls—visit. Even your sister-cousin-soul. All so I don’t have to miss you when you’re gone.

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