Froth of the Champagne

Annabele was a creature of vanity, old demi-monde, froth of the champagne. She was mistress of the drawing room, a high ceiling fortress she stalked day and night, eating minced liver from crystal goblets, stretching her neck to reveal collars of diamonds, purring and screaming in all feline variations, exposing the vocal accessories of her natural triumph. In march, she died. He spent hours at the bathroom sink, running his soft boy hands under warm water, that was the he erased pain. He and she built a bed sheet fort in Annabele’s old home, pushed a queen size bed into its middle and embalmed themselves in bed together indefinitely, surrounding themselves with bowls of funeral lasagna, stolen cough drops, pretty treasures, a complete china tea set filled with chocolate milk. They’d trap each other where their emotional islands had to collide, sleep-talking, using a butter knife to open sympathy notes embossed on bone vellum, filling pillow cases with embroidered poetry, playing patient and nurse, unraveling into their dead cat’s half-world.

It was restful and tender at first, and yet such opulence would eventually make he and she useless and frail, their throats scraped clean by phantom emotions. He and she where lost to some illusory, somnambular duet. Their skin grew milkier, whiter, their temperaments dropped to childlike levels as they alternated crying tantrums, victim to the twilight of the mind, its violent slippages and imagos.

It could have been the end of them, the nightmare counter narrative, lovers frozen in deference to their melancholy, sealed off in a cat coma, sleep encrusted ghost bodies, the contents of their dissonant mutterings rising and falling against limestone walls of a dark, cobwebbed drawing room that no longer heard the soft steps of her paws. It was the easy, pretty way out of life’s glum; it was another quilt of untruths.

Anabelle was a stuffed animal his mother gave him. Finding her again hit some distant, antique chord of a minor elegy still echoing in his heart. Sewn of paisley fabric the color of cream and apricots, she lays there in that childhood picture of him yawning in red pajamas, and now she lays between their two adult bodies in bed each night, a keyhole backward, to fragile boyhood, defenselessness, each night he made his respectful submission. There was no funeral, no collars of diamonds; her death was the myopic fantasy she attached to the slow, gentle saraband they began and ended in his boyhood bedroom in Iowa; sleeping, weeping in triple time, the salt of their eyes staining bed sheets as they tore through old mental caverns, solemnizing their aching past.

Annabelle come to life, their quiet, coup d’etat, each one helping the other to betray an untenable reality. they stayed there in that bed clinging to that stuffed cat, their hearts crying out, composing an anthem, a sepulchral hymn, one rule it sung,


that the world and happiness may be had as a gift – from the mother.

they called it sick, they called it disgusting, they called it by any thing other than what it was. deceit was their wile, an intoxicant, an elixir; it could heal them.