I am pretty sure that your Boo Radley is looking out from behind different blinds in a different town than my Boo Radley, so even if help comes for the both of us at the same time it won't come in the same place. And I think you realized that the day that your gaze slid from the inside corner of your eye out to the opposite edge. Your eyes narrowed, then, and you looked at me like fingernail scratches. Like you were starving. Those moments flared like signal fires, which I would have noticed, I think, had I not been walking in gently curved squares around you trying to build you into my circle of salt. It was only after the door closed that I noticed the smell of sulphur on the air.
So I left early in the morning, already forgetting. Before I walked I whispered into your softly sleeping ear about a snake that lives in Japan and borrows the poison from the toads that it eats. I think that I was happy, passing my hand across the shadow of your bones like skeleton keys, created solely to open whatever doors they come across.
I took to whispering with my ghosts, hiding all of my treasures in the crook of that tree. A girl with any courage might have cut her hair and changed her name and left town, but I have always searched for my hermit crabs on the same banks, imaginary claws clutching acres of imaginary flesh.
No comments:
Post a Comment