The Man She Couldn’t Forget (published in a Bad Penny Review)

If he were light, he’d be a lotus petal. A fledging thought inside a girl, lonely on city streets, intuitive on mountaintops. Instead, he left a suicide note that read: The world is not a pond. I am a sturgeon. Everyone wants me for dinner. I’m not even that tasty anymore. I keep floating down. . . Miss tHing fishes him half-way from the water, imagines his eyes of negative space, the ferric taste of the stud on the lower lip, the body heavy, a gunnysack of body parts once fresh with her fingerprints. She decides: He is too waterlogged to be saved. She removes her orange silk top, the low cut jeans that were a real bargain in a city of near-drownings. Underwater, she tows the sturgeon-man to where he will be safe from swimmers, from wanna-be heroes with a missing limb. On TV, they have a whole channel to themselves. Towards bottom, it’s dark, darker than any room where she ever slept alone or never quite woke up. She has the feeling that everything here is vigilant and pristine. A thousand eyes light up. A voice swims inside her head—Leave us be. Pretend you never saw anything. She returns to shore, spitting up gobs of what she can’t remember. She looks up at the slate sky. Nothing is written down.