Yours.

They say that grief makes a person do crazy things.  I say anyone who believes that has never known grief.  Sorrow, I 
grant you, sadness, bereavement, loss.  But not grief.  Grief makes a person do the sanest things in the world.  It’s just that the 
world they know is different from the one you know.

	The night I came home and found her in the library, the papers she was grading stained with blood, I already knew, 
before I turned her over, before I felt how cold the skin beneath my fingers was, before I realized the window was still open, 
before I discovered the rain puddling on floor beneath her desk.  Blood doesn’t reflect in the dark.  I had to turn on the lamp to 
see the blood but not to know that she was gone.  In dim, buttery light the eyes that stared back at me were not her eyes.  The 
long shadows in the room moved with the wind and echoed with sighs the sound of my strangled screams and they laughed at 
me from all the dark corners of the room.  I could hear the whispers of congratulations in every doorway of the house:  they’d 
got her at last.  

	That night after the police left and my brother had made up a bed in the spare room - I didn’t want to leave the house, 
not yet - I sat up in our - my -- bed in the darkness, listening for her.  Hate crime?  Surprised burglar?   I didn’t care who they 
thought had killed her, which in the movies would have made someone ask questions, I suppose, but from my perspective she 
didn’t belong to her killers she belonged to the darkness.  And it couldn’t have her.  Lily was mine, and I wanted her back.  
Our - her  - cat paced across my body, frustrated and uncomfortable.  Taboo was an enormous black tom Lily had 
bought for a dollar at a jumble sale in Lexington.  He fell asleep every night sprawled across our ribcages, two pairs of breasts 
pressed against his belly like some odd parody of pink kittens nursing.    It had always amused Lily how much Taboo 
loved her, or more precisely loved her body.  He would spend hours kneading her breasts with his surprisingly tiny 
paws, and on the nights when she lay spent beneath me or beside me, her skin glimmering just a little like snow in 
starlight, he would tread his way up her body and lick at the long, full column of her throat.  She always arched it for him, 
pushing her head back against the pillows, giving him her neck, shoulder, collar bone, her laugh like silver bells and I would 
smile, usually, and watch Taboo on the woman I loved, until, inevitably, I got too jealous just to watch, and the cat was 
banished to the floor to watch and sulk while it was my turn.

“Baby girl,” I whispered.  “Whose are you?”

And her breathy, husky answer, sighed or screamed, but always, “Yours.  I’m yours.”

“Till when?”

“Forever.”

They were all in here, with me, every one of those long nights when the darkness and the shadows and Taboo watched jealously.   
Watched while I took her tiny delicate wrists in my hands and lifting them up above her head, tied them there with white scarves. 
Her hair was like light.  I could spend hours just burying my lips in her hair.  I loved to make her wait while I explored or 
rediscovered every curve of her delicately white skin.  Moving my fingertips from the crown of her head, over each curve of her 
beloved face, lingering at her lips with just the barest tip of a long, polished fingernail, drawing dark blood and cleaning it up 
with my pale pink tongue.

Her mouth opened beneath mine, giving me the chance to torment the lines that pressed up against her teeth and jaws the smooth 
curved roof of her mouth, so much like that other curved opening I could feel pressed up against my belly, already desperate for the 
touch she knew I wasn’t ready to give her.  

	My breasts pressed into her breasts, ravishing her mouth so slowly that the music of her whimpers trilled like 16th notes up 
and down some ancient, unwritten scale.  Lips on throat, and whimpers turning to moans as scraped my teeth along the area Taboo’s 
rough tongue had left raw.  Bruising her just enough.  “Darling … whose are you?”

	“Yours.”

	Kissing my way down between her breasts, pausing to rub my cheekbones, jaw, mouth, forehead into her rib cage.  Hot breath 
against her nipples, and they’re straining, she’s straining, against the scarves at her wrists.   I dig my fingernails into the tightening 
buds, hearing her whimpers turn to gasps and then to cries of something not-quite-pain, then cries of not-quite-relief as I bend to 
taste them.  My lips’ soft kisses are soothing, and the cool breath I blow gently across each stiffened golden peak makes her arch 
further up off the bed - our bed - and into my waiting mouth, my cupping palm.  She’s sighing, my name falling from her breath like 
prayer.  I run my tongue over and over a single spot on her nipple, then spiral slowly outwards, while my fingernails, cool as pearls, 
circle its sister.  There are nights when she’ll come, just like this, stretched out beneath me with her hair spilling over her shoulders 
like angel wings, her belly dipping and swaying like the deck of a ship and my mouth on her breasts, suckling and biting and oh, I 
forgive Taboo then.

	But tonight I need more than that from her, and when I feel her body begin to shake I switch my attention to bones of her 
ribcage, firm ridged like ripples on sand.  Or to the delicate rise of her hipbones.  Or dip my tongue into her navel to hear her scream, 
before moving I’m satisfied her tremors will not shake her loose from me, not yet, and lick, taste, bite, my way back up to her other 
breast and give it the same torment, the same pleasure as before.

	And when she’s crying, when I can taste the tears, sharper salt than the pools of musky sweat that have gathered in every 
hollow of her body, when her head is thrashing back and forth and her hands clenched helplessly, and only when her entire vocabulary 
has reduced itself to one word “Yours!” then I will crouch between her thighs, in the archetypal pose of serenity and worship, and part 
her golden fur with tongue.  The taste of her is never the same twice:  sometimes spring honey sometimes autumn earth,  but always 
something rich and life-giving.  Barely musky, barely sweet.  She’ll scream for me, then, her knees draped across my shoulders, her 
heels digging into the thick dark mass of swirling curls that lies heavily against my neck.  My tongue and teeth will pull every drop from 
her body, from her soul, spilling against my lips and into my mouth, down my throat.  I can’t stop, can’t stop tasting her, feeling the 
contrasts against my tongue:  the impossibly satin smoothness of each delicate stroke, the tickling course golden fur on my lips, and 
the hardened bundle of blood rich nerves rolling between my front teeth, as delicate and sweet as glass candy.  

	And the smooth puddle grows beneath her hips, spreading against our sheets, flooding our bed, and there’s too much, 
she’s being carried away from me by the liquid rushing around her, rain pouring from an open window now, taking her away and 
now I’m screaming for her, and I never scream for her, that isn’t how this works. “You’re mine!” and curtains of darkness are 
falling between us … 

	And it’s my brother shaking me awake, pushing my dark hair away from my face so I can see the lamp’s been turned on and 
the room is half in shadows, half in light.  But she’s there, in the shadows, just out of reach.  I tell my brother “Just a nightmare” 
and send him away rather abruptly because I want the room to return to darkness.  She’s still in here.  I can smell the faint musk of
 her sex still in the air and I realize they don’t have all of her yet, and there’s still time to put things right.


The night before Lily’s funeral my brother and his wife insisted I stay at their house and I complied because I didn’t want any 
rguments (shouting always made Lily nervous - she never quite got used to the way my brother and I could have a mighty row 
at dinner and be laughing by dessert) and because it would have looked odd if I hadn’t.  I didn’t want to leave her, wandering 
alone through the house with only Taboo howling in confusion every time she came into the room or drifted past the patch of sun 
he was sleeping in and turning it cool to the touch.   She was restless.  I was restless.  But I could feel her now, occasionally hear 
her soft footsteps on the floorboards, sometimes even the softest sighs of her breathing, and I took this as a good sign.  

The smell of her - her pine-flower perfume, the musky, heavy smell of her sex, and that indefinable quality of her skin that I could taste
 on my tongue when I trailed it down her neck and between her breasts was in our bed constantly now, stronger than it had been when 
she was alive, driving me crazy and keeping me from concentrating on the interminable round of tasks that go into the death of a 
loved one.   (In stories they never tell you how tedious it all is: the casket, flowers, clothes, food, phone calls.)  And while I went 
through the day mechanically and said the things I was supposed to say and cried at the appropriate intervals, at night I stayed 
awake under the sheets, with Taboo pacing back and forth over my stomach with his noisy, pointless grief and waited for her.

She always came to me, sometimes before midnight, sometimes not till the sky had begun to get smoky, sticky with daybreak, but she 
always came.   Her breath was cold at first, against my neck, raising the skin on my arms, the hair on the back of my neck.  So cold, 
almost cruel, so not like Lily in those first moments as she trailed her mouth over my neck, sucking hard at the pulse point, biting hard 
with teeth as cold and sharp as a sewing needle.   She bit, sucked, kissed my throat, and her breath began to roll against my body, 
silent, cool, but oh so welcomed, and I would feel the flush of my own blood rising to the surface of my skin, becoming slick with sweat. 
 Everywhere her breath touched my nerves jumped into life, seeking more of that indefinable sensation that was somehow life and 
death in one.  Lily might spend long moments, doing nothing but breathing with a slow, steady rhythm in circles around my navel, or 
trailing her soft, cool lips from the tips of each finger, down to the palm of my hand and across my wrist.  Her tongue drawing curves 
and lines down the long muscles and forgotten nerves of the inner arm and the crook of my elbow, helplessly subdued to stillness 
against the sheets.  She drank the water and salt from my skin, took tiny bites that occasionally drew blood, and with each drop that 
past her lips and each moment she sucked she grew just that much warmer until I could feel her fingers, almost solid against my 
thigh or my ribcage, with no more weight or strength than a butterfly wing or a soap bubble.  But there, undeniably: sliding playfully 
between the pooling wetness of my thighs, stroking my breasts into painfully tight buds.   The more I gave her the more she wanted, 
my hips catching the movement of her breath moving with it, against it, twisting helplessly in the growing windstorm.   As she suckled 
on my breasts, ignoring my pleas that she stop (that she never stop) her breath became sound, her tongue became warm and the 
shimmer of her hair could be seen spread across my ribs and shoulders.  And I came, just from the suckling of lips, teeth and tongue,
 and came again, impossibly harder when she switched and completed another long, slow torment.  I cried her name out and I simply 
cried for everything we lost, and cried again for everything we still had.

And when she knelt between my thighs and I felt her eager fingers drawing me apart, felt that cool delicious breath against my 
heat, felt her tongue so gently drawing my wetness - me - into her mouth white light and crayola colors rippled behind my eyes 
and I was blind with pleasure.  And when I felt her teeth and lips suck hungrily I arched back up off the sheets, screaming as I t
ried to fit my body into hers, forgetting, always forgetting in that moment that her body was waiting to be covered with white 
roses and earth.   She swallowed my screams, every cry of joy or pain or moan of passion that fell from my lips landed on her tongue 
and the sounds became words.  

“Rita, I’m not supposed to be here.  Let me go.  Please let me go.”

The air was heavy, so heavy in those moments after that it was almost like having her back.  The smell of her was so strong in the 
humid air over our bed it was almost like the weight of her body after the nights we made love while she was still alive.  I could 
find my way to her by smell, by heat, by the sounds of the heavy, ragged breathing of love without release.  I found her, found the 
musky, fertile warmth of her and milked it with my tongue and fingers.  Pushed two fingers deep inside her, brushing, pumping, 
stroking her slick inner walls until her words turned back to sounds. 

“You’re mine, Lily.  You do belong here.  Whose are you?”  I stilled my fingers against her whimpers of protest.  Waited.  “Whose are you?”

“Yours.”  And her whimpers turned to screams, and the screams to sighs and the sighs to soft breathing and the breathing to the wind sighing through the bedroom curtains and she was gone for another day.  



So, the night before the funeral, I slept at my brother’s house and dreamed of asparagus and cats and a bunch of other things I didn’t 
remember when I woke up and considering the day I was about to have, I figured it had been a good idea after all.  My sister-in-law 
made me coffee in the morning and the twins spilled their tang and fought over who got the last chocolate pop-tarts.  My niece was the
 only one of the five of us who cried at breakfast.  The grownups were exhausted, and she was surrendering to the drama of her 
first real tragedy with that same mute misery I’d noticed in Taboo.  

	After, neighbors and friends and family and co-workers crowded into my - our - house: dining room, parlour, the back porch 
(a few brave or callous souls wandering past the library on pretense of looking at a photograph or admiring a plant as if the closed doors 
would offer a coy glance inside if crept up upon slowly), cramming our kitchen with congealed salad and yellow cake from boxed mixes 
and taco dip and a bunch of other food Lily wouldn’t have eaten when she was alive.  They laughed and cried and a few even shivered if 
Lily drifted too close to them.  She was lonely; it was her party and she couldn’t come.  It’s not just the living who get hungry after 
death.  The dead do too.  Close friends hugged me and tried to pet Taboo and were startled to find our normally sociable cat skittish 
and jittery.   Several asked me if I was planning on selling the house, which struck me as very funny.

	One by one, they left, leaving behind their covered dishes and vases of flowers and quite a few I never saw again.  I was 
never the sociable one, even at the holidays or a weekend with friends or for an hour at a cocktail party.  For one thing I didn’t like 
to share Lily.  Now I don’t have to.

	I go to work.  I go out enough to keep the gossip down and spend holidays with my brother who deflects his well-meaning 
wife’s efforts at setting me up with a nice woman she met at book club (I sometimes wonder if she doesn’t seek out lesbian book 
clubs for the sole purpose of finding nice women to put me in awkward dinner situations with).  People whisper behind my back how 
worn out I look, how tired, how I’ve aged 10 years since Lily died.  I don’t care.

Lily’s still here; she’ll always be here, now, she’ll always be waiting for me.  She drifts from room to room, a cold breath, a white
 shadow, footfalls on the carpet, until night comes.  At night she lies beside me, drinking the sweat off my skin and taking my 
breath like tiny sips of wine.  She needs me now, the way I’ve always needed her.  That last power she’d ever had over me was 
gone and she needs me.  She’s restless.  I know this.  Desperate to be more than a mindless phantom, to feel and think and to 
form words instead of drifting on a sigh from room to room in the house she used to love and that now imprisons her.  Her soul is 
inside of me, where it’s always been and she can feed off the thick, hot liquid she draws out of my core until she knows herself, 
but it’s never enough to take back what she’s given me and move on.   

I know she’s tired.  But she promised.  “Whose are you?”

“Yours.”

“Till when?”

“Forever.”
