I Am Ninety. Or Ninety-three. One Or

I Want Her To Melt Into Me, Like Butter On Toast. I Want To Absorb Her And Walk Around For The Rest Of My Days With Her Encased In My Skin. I Want.

We Traveled For Two Weeks With A Pickled Hippo.

But It All Zipped By. One Minute Marlena And I Were Up To Our Eyeballs, And The Next Thing We Knew The Kids Were Borrowing The Car And Fleeing The Coop For College. And Now, Here I Am. In My Nineties And Alone.

How Hard Can It Be To Find A Girl And An Elephant For Christ's Sake?

Afterward, I Curl Around Her. We Lie In Silence Until Darkness Falls, And Then, Haltingly, She Begins To Talk...she Speaks Without Need Or Even Room For Response, So I Simply Hold Her And Stroke Her Hair. She Talks Of The Pain, Grief, And Horror Of The Past Four Years; Of Learning To Cope With Being The Wife Of A Man So Violent And Unpredictable His Touch Made Her Skin Crawl And Of Thinking, Until Quite Recently, That She'd Finally Managed To Do That. And Then, Finally, Of How My Appearance Had Forced Her To Realize She Hadn't Learned To Cope At All.