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.
 
 
 

As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA. She now calls Wyoming home, where she teaches kindergarten at the Laramie Montessori School. Her work has recently been published at The Axe Factory and is forthcoming in Carve Magazine.