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132 the widows’ handbook Crazy Menu Tess Gallagher Last of his toothpaste, last of his Wheat Chex, last of his 5-Quick-Cinnamon-Rolls-With-Icing, his Pop Secret Microwave Popcorn , his Deluxe Fudge Brownie Mix next to my Casbah Nutted Pilaf on the sparser shelf. I’m using it all up. Chanting: he’d-want-meto -he’d-want-me-to. To consume loss like a hydra-headed meal of would-have-dones accompanied by missed-shared-delight. What can I tell you? I’m a lost proof. But something eats with me, a darling of the air-that-is. It smacks its unkissable lips and pours me down with a gleam in its unblinkable eye, me— the genius loci of his waiting room to this feast of rapidly congealing unobtainables. Oh-me-ofthe -last-of-his-lastness through which I am gigantically left over like the delight of Turkish Delight. Don’t haul out your memory vault to cauterize my green-with-moment-thumb. Or shove me into the gloom-closet of yet another cannibalistic Nevermore. I’ve been there. And there too. It was not unusual—that bravado of a castrato in a brothel yanking his nose and waxing paradisal. No, I’m more like a Polish miner who meets a Chinese miner at a helmet convention in Amsterdam. Because we both speak a brand of Philip Morris English picked up from a now extinct murmur heard only impromptu at a certain caved-in depth, we are overwhelmed by the sheer fact of meeting and we clasp each other by our bare heads for nights, exchanging memories, ghosts, dreams 133 the unimpoverishable secrets of the earth, the going down and the coming up, the immutable pretext of light, a common history of slumped canaries, of bereaved kinfolk, of black-lunged singers and handmade coffins. We trade a few eulogies and drinking songs and sit down at last to a huge meal of aged cheese and kippers. We lean into our vitals with all the lights off. It’s dark inside and out. This is our last chance to revel in the unencumbered flickering of Balinese tapers we bought at a souvenir stand above the canal. Like rice and spit we are tolerant of all occasions, this being the lifting of the dread whereby the girls’ wings we autograph onto our duffle coats have been painted like butterflies, only on the upside so the dark is mocked by our raised arms, our fluttered concentration, uncollectable as the lastness I am of him I love-ed scribbled unsentimentally on a valentine in 98: To the King of my Heart! In daylight we pick up our tinned rations and hike off, every artery and nerve of us, into the rest of our commemorative lives. ...

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