They spawn in Vermont’s winters, choosing a warm, sunny window to lay eggs, hatch themselves. When we arrive on weekends, the floor is always littered with black bodies. Every day, no matter how many we kill, tomorrow, more have sprung to life. They cannot come from the bitter outside; they bubble from within, parasites. Their days are spent buzzing at the window, looking for the one small opening that would loose them to freedom— and sure, frozen death. They squeeze into the window tracks, head for the lit lamps of early evening, bang about the door. This has been my honeymoon week, here in Vermont with the flies. My second new husband and I— his second new wife— have banged about, frightened by ‘til death do us, the incomprehensible meaning of forever, the incredible weight of genes and habits. Instead, we look for the microscopic place in the glass, the one small opening, that will set us free to certain, frozen death.

It’s like pulling the dry skin off lips, irresistible until you taste blood, and even then, one last pull and the last translucent slip is free. The blood rises, nerve endings tickling the air like exposed wires. More and more, this is how I feel in our space. All that’s dead we’re peeling back, where we can, the layers of ex-husband, ex-wife, parents, the word “sheep” or “click” or “pie,” perhaps—that brings another word cracked like a leather belt, like a branch in a blizzard. We try, but then we pull back, let the scar form, that toughened bit of leather that next time will take a knife, more than plucking at least.

Round, etched rose gold, too heavy for any modern Tawainese-sewn pocket, your gift weights my palm, a drill-punched circle of heavy heart, ticking just slower than time. It arrived after the towers collapsed and my lover’s wife had died and I had won him in a terrible lottery that left me holding the ticket, stunned and silent and so afraid that time had already run through my illicit fingers, slippery, gelatinous. Could I lose him twice to grief? You watch across the reflective mirage of distance, wondering, warm like the heavy inevitable tomorrow, like the parentheses I know I’ll find under my pillow when I’m changing the sheets, the future I won and can never possess. My shameful inadequacy to love sufficiently slopes away in pathetic disorder: a mountainside littered with glass and gravel. The watch ticks— that’s my life passing. What do I do with my longing? Its impractical desires bend in all directions at once, a sparkler fizzling in the night air.