Prowler

Long legs like crinoline around my hips. I peel her off the parapet. A little later, I'll wash her face with cold water, but mind my suds around her eyes. She has yet things to see, my jelly-belly raucuous baby. But before, I'll tuck her under the floorboards to check for mites, and dust my best fleece coat for fleas. Enjoys some good wordplay, my little minstrel from the sticks, so I'll count to thirteen, then press my lips to the floorboards and whisper it to her. I'll give her warning beforehand, because when I don't, she laughs too hard and bumps her head on the floor above. I will say,

I am about to tell you a joke.

To which she will say… nothing. Because my ghost-lolly never speaks. Though she does occasionally crinkle a rapid-fire stream of jumble-jungle nonsense I'm getting too old to decode. And then, when she does, it's my turn to say nothing. If she starts when I've gone, she won't know until the floorboards are spick-span and by then, I'm mostly home anyhow. I don't much stay out past dark, make my bed inside the nook of her thumbprint arm and clink my manacles against hers whenever I've come out of a nightmare. My way of saying you're here, wayfarer.
She gets upset with me when I don't listen to her because I make a point of wearing a wooly hat over my head, always, so she doesn't know I pawned my ears to buy her a longer leash three months ago.

Three months and sixteen days in which she's been tiptoeing a little farther from me. And I haven't even been able to hear her deserting me properly. I have nothing to offer her. I am a man without meat on his bones, spread-eagled across two continents more than is physically good for either of us. I am a corkscrew man with impossible, weak ankles. When she's busy under the floorboards, my pluck-brow, best-coat mouse, I prowl darkened streets and peer into strange bedrooms. Women's bedrooms, remind me of mother, remind me of myself. Tell nothing and no one of these parts that are missing from me, of taking life on the chin, of hallways, and mirrors, or forgetting the smell of summer rain inside my knees.

I am vanishing from her, and must best keep our house clean, because when I am dead, she'll have no one to wash or help her. My monster claws will retract, and she will wear a string of teeth around the nape of her neck. My teeth. Unless I'm forced to pawn them as well before their time.
I'm finding now I've made a terrible mistake. I hitched her to my cart, pretended I didn't know about my loose-belt saddle, the chafing between legs when I go too far. And still, I can't help myself. When I step outside and smell the earth under foreign heels, I catch myself trailing them, chasing strange women with low-hang bellies, and retractable hems. Fix pantyhose on my retina to wash down the growling in my belly. The fact that my stomach ain't worked properly in twenty years.

In my heart, I'm in love with a woman twice my size, am sailing far above land on ballooning breasts, incorrigible, throw up to throw down, but at my core, still, a decent man.
I come visit it at the end of these long walks. My heart. For six years, lapping up the dust inside pawnbroker's window. Unclaimed, least of all by myself, when I still had money to claim it. I reckon it's more trouble than it's worth. Reckon someone out there still might benefit. That a coward spelled backwards goes by a different name.

That I don't hear inside my ear the crinkle-call of my mouse when the house is ready and her throat's gone dry. I trace back my steps brisk, sparing no blush for young women's windows. My woman needs me. Coming through the door, I kneel on her throat to peer inside, and find iny my absence, my lover's worked painstakingly to gather up the dust, and arranged it into a facsimile of my own dry-powder heart.

I hold out my hand for her to jump inside, but before, I must scoop out her tongue to wash separately inside a small teacup I keep especially for this purpose. Bath time. My lover wraps herself around my thumb, lest I suddenly get it into my head to drown her. I rub out the past. I shampoo her hair with my pinky fingernail. Remember drawing once her outline in chalk. Setting out her own private tea towel on the dish-dry rack.

It has been a good day, and later, I will cut it off from our calendar. One of the last.