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55 The Rings When I was twisting the ring off your finger and hit the thickness of the middle knuckle and had to leave you alone to get a jar of vaseline so I could ease it off the rest of the way you were still alive. Breathing like a broken motor. Your eyes, open and pale, looked, it seemed, at me. I think I was talking to you. I hope I told you what I was doing, and why I couldn’t wait any longer. I wrote out a dialogue after you died. As always, you were generous. You said you forgave me. Months later, when I was twisting the ring off my finger, my finger became engorged like a sausage, it turned crimson with outrage. I thought it would pop off. I stopped breathing. Why this moment and not the one before, or next week, some poetic anniversary. I immersed my hand in a bowl of ice and waited for the chill shrinkage of our 43 years together, then drenched my finger in liquid soap and twisted hard. It hurt like hell. I kept twisting. Oh how it hurt, and I cried out, mortally wounded in that fleshless desert between the body and the mind. A line was being drawn, thin as my ring. Each time I cross over the white border my ring once covered, I am more marked, more naked. ...

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