"I'm Not Finished."

Three days after we put her in the ground,
I heard her voice in the kitchen -
not a memory, not the echo
grief makes of the dead,
but her voice, her actual voice,
saying my name
the way she said it when I was a boy
and she'd caught me in a lie.

I went to the kitchen.
Empty.

But the chair she used to sit in
was warm.

I touched the cushion.
I held my hand there
longer than I should have.
Warm, like a body just risen.
Like someone had only stepped away.

That night she came to me
in the place between waking and sleep,
that country where the body forgets
how to move.

She leaned over me.

I smelled her -
talcum and menthol
and underneath,
the grave.

And she opened her mouth,
and inside her mouth
was not teeth, not tongue,
but a darkness with weight,
a well that went down
past where the body ends,
past where the dead are supposed to stop -

and from that darkness,
a voice that was hers
and was not hers:

I'm not finished.

I woke standing in the kitchen.

The chair was warm.

My mouth tasted like wet soil.

That was three weeks ago.

Since then:

I woke on Tuesday in the garden,
kneeling in the dirt
by the roses she planted
the year I was born.
I don't remember going outside.
My fingernails were black with earth.
My knees ached like prayer.

My wife asked me Thursday
why I called her Darlene.
I didn't call her Darlene.
Darlene was my grandmother's sister.
She's been dead since 1986.
I don't remember speaking.

I made liver and onions for dinner.
I've hated liver all my life -
the smell alone turns my stomach.
But I ate the whole plate.
I asked for seconds.
It tasted like something
I'd been missing for years.

I found a grocery list on the counter
in my handwriting,
but the words weren't mine:
tomatoes, flour, lard, ribbon for church.
We don't go to church.
I haven't written in cursive in ages.
The list was in cursive.

Last night my wife woke me,
shaking my shoulder,
her face strange in the dark.
She said I'd been talking.
She said I was calling out Donnie, Donnie...
my name, but not the way I say it.
The way my grandmother said it.
The way you call a child
who's wandered out of sight.

This morning my wife looked at me
across the kitchen table
and her face did something
I'd never seen before.

Why are you sitting like that?

I didn't know what she meant.

Your hands, she said.
That's not how you sit.
That's how...

She didn't finish.

And I looked down at my hands
folded in my lap,
folded the way my grandmother
used to fold hers -
thumbs crossed left over right,
fingers laced like a lock,
like a door that only opens
from one side -

and I tried to unfold them.

And they didn't move.

And something inside me laughed -

a small laugh,
dry and satisfied,
the laugh she used to make
when she'd won an argument
and wanted you to know it...

and it wasn't me.