I am neither the doctor's wife nor the fiddler's play thing.

In ten years, I'll understand how the river carved me; how it moldered my bones into pebbles and passed me along aimlessly. My sedentary layers still in his bed, feeling only an undeniable, inevitable stirring.

Better.

It's my own fucking fault.

My life in 24 year increments, soon to be 48, then 72, and I'll stop after 96 because my heart breaks too much.

I'm torn in the same ways he is: half across and down the middle. The lines drawn are definitive and angular like the jaw against which I pressed my lips. The holes in my day are the deep eyes that watched me sleep.

I sleep through the sky flaking apart, coating the roads with diamond dust. Beneath blankets, my empty hands dream in the day and shoot in the dark.

November after Afghanistan

The days he's home are the quietest. My voice tucked in a box, slipped under my bed; I hear it dancing as I fall asleep at night. He sleeps through most days, stirring at 3am because he's not heroic enough, or maybe not the right kind. The deer hunters cap and pop buck shots in the field out back, sinking his stomach before he realizes he’s here and not there.

Autumn gusts leave him rattled, and during the day I gather sticks around the yard--weak arms snapped from their body.

Inevitably, they will be strategized into the stove.

I can no longer speak to him directly. I tend now to forget that words have two meanings: what I intend to show; what I wish to say. Instead, I craft comfort for voiceless necks. The crochet hook taps against my ring, a Morse Code clicking single stitch.

Hook/chain: your war wounds are showing.

Speaking solely of the restlessness I've found in blank bottles on a shelf in the basement; of emptying those bottles into the cold creek overflowing, and of the wind pushing me home.

A delicate wave of split skin, a scabbed gape over my thumb's knuckle; my littlest one drew my blood. She would no doubt shred my skin to lace before licking each wound--tenderly, but not so much apologetically. In the mornings, she displays something of graciousness and need. At night, she runs along the edge of the woods, chasing the sound of her own foot steps.