matchbook

eeks after my therapist died, I went to his grave and dug up his body, hoping it could tell me what was wrong with me. I didn’t care that he had just died or that I saw his daughter sobbing at the grocery store the day before, clutching a box of off-brand cocoa puffs to her chest. I wanted to know how to fix me. He must’ve had a secret code, hidden somewhere inside him, one that he refused to give because he knew that I wanted it too much, that I was too desperate for it. I snuck out the front door in the middle of the night, careless about the way my feet made the floorboards creak or how I slammed the door because my grandmother had recently lost her hearing, and my twin sister and I were currently fighting, and our parents had died when we were little anyway. When I tried to steal my neighbor’s shovel that was perpetually leaning against his rotting shed, the handle popped out and left streaks of decaying wood on my hands. When I put my earbuds in during the fifteen-minute walk to the graveyard, I discovered that my sister had taken a pair of scissors to the jack. I kept them in my ears, the wire dangling to just below my belt, listening to the mockingbirds singing, hidden beneath the wind. It took me too long to find his grave marker, long enough for the still-hiding sun to cast a blue hue over the sky. When I did, I dropped to my knees and began to claw at the ground, dirt grinding into the thin space between my fingernails and my skin as I dug, and dug, and dug. When I reached his coffin, there was dirt all over my arms, my face, my shoulders, and still I dug, still I tugged the lid open, still I stared at his fetid body, wishing I had a roadmap that led me to an answer. My hands pushed through the skin on his chest, the blue light of the sun illuminating the green-purple-black tint to his skin, colors he never wore during our sessions. I shoved aside his heart and lungs, half liquid, half rotten sponge, pulled away his soupy arteries and veins, tore his liver and diaphragm into pieces. Something told me I had to get to his bones. I tried his humerus first, stained almost watercolor yellow, cracking it into two, peering into both halves as if it was a vintage spyglass. Then his femur, then every single one of his phalanges and metacarpals. My fingers danced over the sutures on his skull before I moved towards his ribs, his spine, and then finally, as the sky started to shift into orange tones, I tried the last bone left, his clavicle, squinted into one end, then placed my mouth over one of the jagged holes and sucked. The bone marrow dust coated my teeth, my gums, my uvula, dancing with the dirt, until a small piece of paper fluttered onto my tongue. It was damp, the size of a paper slip inside a fortune cookie, one side blank, the other side saying, in small red print, you lose.