1. His voice was the color of hypothermia.  It snuck up his neck and slithered through the frosty tunnels of her mind. He never spoke agai-

2. She wondered how long the dirt under his fingernails would take to disintegrate as he rotted in the wooden casket. 

3. The hurricane left a breath of smoke in the back of her throat. 

4. She felt the silvered bolt sliding through her head, sending spicy waves shuddering to her thumbs.

5. She could smell their bitter sobs like lemons that had soaked in vinegar. 

6. His sleep sounded like medieval music that had been played out of a tinny speaker.

7. She saw Venus rising as soon as his mother began to whisper. 

8. Her eyes were John F Kennedy and her hands were Times Square.  They had no coordination, or, for that matter, correlation.  He had always hated that. 

9. Actually, she couldn’t care less about the dirt under his nails.

10. All she saw was that he looked exactly the same as he had when he was alive. 

11. He yelled a lot.  Why was he always yelling?  She knew. 

12. “In sickness or health, till death do us part.”

13. See, the wild midnights of life had never really played a part because he had never pulled an all-nighter.

14. She tore his name in half and threw it into the morning, like he had always done-

15. Tomorrow, she will forget about these thoughts.

16. She has to pretend he’s alive to realize he isn’t.

17. Semper procedendum sine timore. 

18. His front door screamed at her.

19. There were exactly 48 people at the funeral, and 39 of them brought flowers.  She brought rocks, instead.

20. and like the canned fruit cries, she remains silent and rots in the open.