Order of Events

First, I had pointed out the unfamiliar garment in the hamper. And then you accused me of hysteria, after which I became interested in laundry soaps: buying in bulk, oxidizing formulas, potions to remove mildew, because sometimes mildew happens in places you do not expect.

Before packing boxes and a truck and emptying your life from my life, you were in charge of removing dead things from the property. I was not one of those things.

After sex.

Each time I wanted to go to church, you would rise for a drink of water, leaving me in the pew with the incense, the organ music, the woman in white who said each week, during the intentions: “That children will learn to LOVE the Lord, we PRAY to the Lord.” You were gone for half an hour.

Then we went to the movies, and popcorn fell from my mouth into my bra. Your buttery fingerprints all over my sternum.

Rewind, projectionist. Those were my fingerprints alone.

During sex.

After you became twisted between lies, someone repurposed items from our refrigerator. You feigned innocence; perhaps you were innocent. I found a mini-bottle of ketchup on my knick-knack shelf, a packet of yeast in the medicine cabinet. A brick of cheddar nested in my lost slipper beneath the bed. I no longer cooked, did not want reminders of food, and there it was, everywhere in the house, mocking my lack of appetite.

For a time, I thought a good deal about laundry soaps, those that remove traces of our being and occupation from the fibers we use to cover ourselves. I would make that strange underwear clean, maybe even wear it, though I favored black to pink.

That was around the time I had to quit technology, give it up cold turkey when I realized it was killing me. Now I know it was killing us. We’d been watching reruns of the show with pretty, vivacious women chatting on enormous cell phones. Once they discover that cell phones cause cancer, I said, this scene will be horrifying.

Her cell phone looks like a shoe, you said. A cancer-causing shoe.

Not long after that, you slipped out back with your phone, your face lit like a smoker’s, though you never smoked. The sliding glass door was better suited to showing me my own reflection. I sat up straighter, neatening the crocheted blanket across my lap.

Once, I learned that the circus peanuts had directions on the back for circus-peanut gelatin, which I wanted to make. One of the candy’s ingredients was gelatin. You had to buy more, use more, in order to reduce the product to one of its parts. The math was troubling. Later still, in my revenge dreams, I imagined pouring orange gelatin salad over your head. Bits of fruit in your ears, peaches and bananas hindering your hearing. I considered hidden ingredients that would not have an aftertaste. Following our shows, you went to the store, and came home two hours later without gelatin. They were out, you said.

Before sex.

Until the cows came home. Which is not as late as you’d think. There was still a little light. They wouldn’t have to be milked again, not for hours.

Finally, months after you drove the U-Haul several states away, I squinted to remember how we started. When was our beginning, and what did it mean that I couldn’t say? My memories were like little pebbles plinking at my bedroom window. You were the last person to ask, Can you come outside? And before too long, I did.