Lost & Found by Brooke Davis

just bone really, nothingmuch more, and he typed, softer than breath,
I am here Evie
, and then walked around to the other side of the bed, and rested his palms on her other arm, and her skin was not her skin, there were bruises up this arm, so purple, with such definite edges, like maps of little-known countries, and he thought,
You are my foreign country
, but he typed,
I am here Evie
, and then he lifted up her hospital gown to just above her knees, and her thighs were just nothing, they were just nothing, and he rested his open palms on one, and felt so much nothingness, and he was crying now, he couldn’t help it, he was so weak, he was so weak, there was just so much nothingness, and he thought about making nothing into something, and he typed with force and flair this time, watching his fingers, the way they moved on her skin, he so desperately wanted her to feel the beauty of what his fingers were doing, and he typed,
I am here Evie I am here Evie I am here Evie
, over and over again, all the way down her thigh, over her knee, down her shin, like a line of ants marching down her leg, and he leaned over the bed and typed down her other leg,
I am here Evie
, and then moved to the bottom of the bed, and held her feet, her very, very cold feet, in his fists, as small children hold crayons, and he was holding them so hard, as hard as he’d ever held anything, but she didn’t move, she didn’t notice, she didn’t even stir.
    I am here Evie
    I am here Evie
    I am here Evie
sadness
    In the days following Evie’s death, Karl whispered the words
My wife’s dead
in the mirror, preparing for some sort of audience. He pictured the woman from the post office, the next-door neighbor, his brother. He loved the feel of their imagined discomfort. The power it gave him. It somehow made all that had happened worthwhile, as though he had gained some sort of secret power through the death of his wife.
    He slept in their wardrobe, looking up at her clothes like he was gazing at the stars. They hung over him like apparitions, the lack of her so obvious in the thinness of these clothes. It felt as though he were lying under a guillotine; long, thin strands of cloth that would surely kill him, somehow.
    He dreamed of her, of course he did, and woke up thinking,
That is the only time I’ll see her now.
He stood up in the darkness and leaned into her clothes, with his arms out like he was flying. Her clothes were so cold.
    He had remembered, every morning, since she died. Woken up, and the shock of remembering. He didn’t want to sleep anymore, because he didn’t want to forget, because the remembering was harder. It was so physical.
    He sat on the toilet seat and stared at her bathroom things. The things she once spread on her skin or sprayed in the air or massaged into her hair. He brought the big saucepan in from the kitchen. He emptied all of her bottles into it. Her perfumes,moisturizers, hand creams, body balms, pill bottles. He mixed them together with his hands. The smell was awful, like something out of a department store. But the feeling between his fingers thrilled him.
    He dug his hands in, deep, up to his elbows, mixed all her creams and smells together. Her empty bottles were strewn all over the bathroom tiles like carcasses. He squelched his hands together, making fart sounds. He did it over and over again, and let the brown mixture spurt out of the pan and onto the mirror, onto his face, onto the walls. He picked up the pan and sat it on their bed.
    My bed
, he thought.
    He hovered his hand over her pillow, as though he could draw her out from the bed with his hand magnets. Light-brown goo dripped on the pillowcase. He took his clothes off and threw them on the ground. He hoisted himself up on the bed, and stood, teetering a little on the mattress, careful not to bump his head on the overhead light. He lifted the pan up to his belly. Breathed in. Closed his eyes. His mouth. And then raised the pan higher and poured the