I hit him where it wouldn’t show, while he wasn’t looking. I was a hunter stalking prey. In sock feet. A cat, legs moving body in a single plane. Eyes focused on target: the meaty part of his buttocks. The closest part of him to me. His body was doubled over a deep sink, washing out supper bowls.

I would hit through my aim, just like Dad taught me. Kneeling down to my level, holding up his hands, cupped slightly. Anticipating the size of my tiny fists. I could never bring myself to do it, though. We would go again and again, his frustration building like red in his throat. Tears filling up behind my eyes. He demanded to know what I would do if he were a stranger.

Kurt and I had been married for thirteen years. He was no stranger. But it seemed like good practice. I pulled my arm back until my shoulder blade met ribs. Breathless. The still moment before the pounce. He didn’t see the reflection of me in the kitchen window. He was looking down, working out some grime with the edge of a scrub pad.

Dad wouldn’t let me split wood. I was nine and my doughy little brother was seven, and Dad handed him the ax and said, “Here, Son.” I boiled. I used one of my new words: sexist. He met the challenge in my flared eyes with a tight side-smirk and handed me the ax. I could barely lift the head off the ground.

THWACK!

Kurt yelped in surprise and pain. His eyes like prey eyes asking, Why? I could only laugh, gasping for breath, deep long sucks of air, tears streaming down my face. For the rest of the night he kept telling me how much it still hurt, how he could have broken that dish, that precious dish. So delicate.

I beamed, satisfied.

There is a moment when I look up—less than a moment, the smallest block of conscious thought—when I see the flakes illuminated in the halo around the streetlight and think it’s snowing. I am a northern girl, so my soul instinctively smiles at the first flurries of a new winter, still white and playful.

But the snow that gathers in the gutters of Manhattan Avenue is not white. And it is not snow. I know this, and I shiver. Not from cold. There are beads of sweat across my brow and my nose is full of the sticky-sweet sour of garbage that had spent all day rotting under the late summer sun. This is the familiar scent of this place. The base layer.

This night there is the other smell, smothering the base like an oil slick. The smell that is a memory, not the image broadcast on TV screens and printed on commemorative coins. It is the smell of things burning that should not burn: florescent lights, cubical walls, Skymall magazines, and eyes mid-seeing. I long to go back to just the innocent smell of sun-rotted things. I could hold my breath through that smell. But this new one penetrates me. It overrides my body scent. It soaks into the lining of my stomach and softens the marrow of my bones. I will stink of it for weeks. We all will.

And when a hollow-eyed stranger approaches me days later with a photo and asks me if I’ve seen this person, his person, I will drop my eyes and shake my head like everybody else. I won’t be able to bring myself to speak the truth that we all feel thickening the air. The truth of her body still here, not lost. The truth that I saw her that night in the glow of the streetlight. And I’ve seen her every morning since in the black that pours off my body and pools around the slow drain in my shower.