Remember when you first stole?

A hummingbird for a heart

You shook.

Hands slick with sweat.

You’ve never known a fear this real.

How it invigorated you.

The chance of deception,

the price of pain.

You’ve known both.

Doubly aching for a penance

you know you cannot pay.

Remember who you stole from?

Your eyes twitch in annoyance.

Guilt was never your strong suit.

There are some hurts too deep to carry.

You know this deep down.

Past your plastic smile,

you chafe from the facade

you’ve presented the world for so long.

You don’t even know what it means to smile for real.

But you remember me.

I know you do.

You remember.

And everyday

I pray to forget.

I wish I could forget the forgotten:

Those who died in righteous conflicts. Those who lived good lives, but for whom no one attended their funerals. Those who died alone, without all the ones who should have been there absent in the end. Those mothers who do and over-do for their children, from slicing off the crust of sandwich bread to working an extra job for their education. Those fathers who teach their sons about the sacredness of daughters and teach their daughters about equality. Those siblings who beat and tickle their brothers and sisters one moment but would die for them the next. Those children who persevere through abuse and immature parents. Those doctors and nurses and others who do little things that aren't their job to make sure those in their care benefit from the maximum. Those in the legal profession who champion the truth over their careers. Those politicians who put freedom over national interests and national interests over party interests. Those children who grow up to raise children right.

All the things we take for granted that are otherwise ignored, by-passed, and so very important, even if posterity doesn't think so.

He came, sweet words and a sultry smile,

clenched fists and wild eyes.

He wanted to break down the walls she built around her heart.

She wished he would succeed, but knew it would be damn hard.

She watched as he threw a punch, then two.

She would have taken down those walls herself, too.

But he walked away, as fast as he came,

at the first sign of a bruise.

Her hair is thick, slightly coarse. It sticks to my fingers just a little when I run my hands through; a soft linen flow, instead of a fine silk. She's utterly unselfconscious, and I'm absolutely enamored.

Her lips never really need colors, and makeup is something she uses out of habit instead of necessity. My favorite times are when she steps from the shower, wrapped in a towel. Her brown and sandy-colored hair is wet to black, and it streaks back along her skull, reminding me of the dancers from Simply Irresistible.

But she's prettier.

The towel drops to the floor, and she's forever caught in a pose as my mind snapshots. She's almost a ballerina, hand outstretched to the mattress, one knee up, one foot grounded, toes flexed, frozen in my mind in the act of climbing into bed.

Waiting for me.

Her skin is bronze and her eyes a deep brown. Her teeth are perfectly white, straight, grinning. She looks back at me looking at her as she climbs and we both fall.

I slide up next to her, contrasting her earth tones with my stark white. She laughs at the ticklish spot on her neck and the smell of her is more than soap and shampoo and her arms wrap me and want me and hold tighter than I've any right to be held.

That embrace is yesterday and tomorrow and it's every today.

Memories like these visit in dreams that feel more like nightmares. We live our lives, but I go in shadows of longing, looming shade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPgfyeQLzkk

Midnight on Halloween, drunk off tequila and bourbon, they laughed and shushed themselves to the iron gate of the old cemetery. Skip opened it and glanced back.

“You gonna chicken out?”

“Fuck you,” Pete shoved him. “How do you know there’s an open grave?”

“Old man Fielding died. He’ll be buried tomorrow. Grave was dug today.”

“It’s pitch black,” Pete whispered, “how can you see?”

“Shhh,” Skip replied, stopping short. “Here it is.”

Pete peered into the hole. “How will I get out?”

“You won’t,” Skip growled, knocking him in the head with a shovel. “Now who’s the starting QB?"

“Don’t ya cry, littlun,” said Uncle, wiping the tears off my face with bruised knuckles twice the size of my own. After, his hand came to rest on my shoulder.

My mother was gone, but I could see her lying there in her open casket.

He took my hand and dragged me away from her. My leather soles slipped on the surface of autumn leaves. The funeralgoers paid us no mind. They cried for the passing of my mother.

I cried not because I lost her, but because he had found me.

“No one will keep us apart now, littlun.”

“Dare,” I said.

“I dare you to stick your hand in the hole.”

I rose to the challenge. Shining my torch on the cave wall, the familiar hole we’d spun many a terrifying tale about stared back at me open-mawed. Hungry.

Every possibility played in my head: masses of spiders consuming my arm, roiling snakes and poisonous fangs, giant black and yellow centipedes with stinging pincers, starved rats chewing my fingers.

My hand entered, and my blood ran instantly cold. Sweat poured down my back, tears streamed down my face, an inaudible scream lodged in my throat.

We shook hands.

There's a knock at the door. As usual, no one is there.

Must be some kind of prank.

The usual assumption, but something's different today.

There's an eerily familiar scent; like the sort of like the cologne my grandfather would wear.

I lie down in bed. It's already nine.

Past my bedtime, I joke to myself.

Getting comfy, I wiggle in the bed a little bit, reveling in the comfort of sleeping alone.

Turning out the bedside lamp, I turn over, and that's when I see it.

My grandfather's corpse is tucked in, staring at me through the darkness.