As I think about the red spilling from those little spouts, I always remember the dream about William when he was sick; not the one where the sky falls apart like wet cardboard boxes, but the dream where he is sitting in the rocking chair and there is a hole in his neck.
 
The hole in his neck is clean and sharp, like a button, black and sewn with black thread. In the dream, William is both alive and dead at the same time.
 
There is another dream where William is a little boy. It is understood that he is a ghost. It is the dream where he haunts me in the bathroom of my first house. Somehow, the white tiles and the soapy light through the window resemble his childish form.
 
But I don’t believe in ghosts. I think that his death was the last thing. Sometimes when I am walking, I have a hard time imagining his last moment: the one just before. That moment must have been a fiction. It must have been a very long story.