I’d been enjoying afternoon walks in the cemetery for as long as we’d lived on the ridge. First it was just me and the stones, made to look insignificant by the towering cliffs; each name bleached out as bones do. Then it was me and the dogs, frenzied as they tore through the tidy lines of flowers and flags. I devoured the names and dates, the epitaphs clearly chosen by beloveds versus the ones chiseled by the dead themselves. A cemetery is only one thing, it does not change and in that stasis the buried feel secure, seen. At least that’s what I hoped for. The twins were born and I became divided. Three bodies instead of one. Pushing them in a rugged stroller, found on Craig’s List, my walks became slower, more panting and mother sweat. I take them to the cemetery to visit the writer, where she went down before she became someone. The kids like to stomp and roll where I imagine her head must be. They say, Good morning, L L L L. Hai, hai. Eventually, Good bye, Looseah. See you tomorruhoh. Blowing kisses down the hill, they remain bewitched by her glittering stone and the tiny rock with red- rust veins that rests on its topmost edge. I no longer have time to go up there alone to pour the writer a splash of wine and pull from the bottle while asking how she managed it all and wondering can you smoke in heaven, or wherever she is now. I’d say I haven’t smoked a cigarette since the 2016 election, but that’d be a lie. Most often, the sitter takes them up there while I’m at work. It’s where we meet so she can hand them over, a smoother transition than at home or where all the other sitters and mothers go to see and be seen; a playground or the farmer’s market. Dear Lucia, the cemetery is our playground.

I was on my way to pick them up when a woman turned the corner ahead of me. Without looking back, she fell into step and we moved forward as one wave on opposite sides of a rough shore. The backs of her arms were turning pink, swollen with dry bumps the color of tiny rat bites. Her elbow skin was a shade darker and rough as the heels of her feet. The rest of her was pale, almost reflective. The sun marched across her skin and ants flickered in the fresh-cut grass. People called her Loie, I think, but whispered behind her back a rumor that this was a made-up name. I was not quite close enough to smell her, but could imagine that she was always damp and warm, recently showered. Green but made soft with the indole stench of browning iris petals. It was Monday, past three, and I was running late.

I tried to pick up my pace, get close enough to touch her. I could track the scratches on the back of her left knee where she’d shaved over goosebumps. An irritation that itches more than it stings. I watched her ankles flex just under a big vein that butted out when she straightened her foot. Her calves were beating, in the shape of a taut heart. Good posture. Toes spread. She took on a heavy, intentional, movement that supposed purpose like starving. She moved with desire, a simple kind, like wishing there was a way to be more naked than naked allowed because it felt so good. She was strutting really, with a focused ease of getting from one familiar place to another.

Parts of her moved like I used to move. I knew how to fall into her rhythm as we swept further away from my desk, piled high with just-one-more things and all those best laid plans for the still-young week. Time slipped off her like silk, melting into the dips of linear cracks in each block of sidewalk. We walked in tandem leg swings. I followed her upturned chin. I started to fantasize about rubbing out the obvious stiffness of her hips. Her right hand was shoved into the pocket of her loose jeans, pulling down against the smooth muscles of her unscarred stomach. Left hand was purposeless at her side. She should’ve been able to hear me coming up behind her. I slowed down, noticed a squirrel digging up seed pods in the faded mulch of someone’s garden. The threat of suburban mundanity has never deterred my love for these hook-arm rodents and she, too, seemed fascinated by the way this one was mining for winter stores amongst the tangles of dried-up rabbitbrush. Squirrels are superior witnesses, I think. Car crashes, muggings, sex acts at the windowsill. There’s nothing mundane about foraging, neither should there be in the act of bearing witness.

I used to sit very still and watch the squirrels that lived in the park by my apartment, entranced by their shifting dynamics of power. With an empty stomach and more time than I knew what to do with, I admired their lonely egos chasing tail. All seemed fed and well rested because, I’d convinced myself, they cared for each other and stayed exhaustively mindful of everything else. Survival being the only necessary thing. They did not, do not, wallow in downpours of feeling. They simply claw themselves from the hawk’s talons and continue searching for food. Each little herd seemed content in their sameness and never frustrated at their relative invisibility. I was only slightly less invisible, waiting for someone. There was the guy who thought wild rodents were diseased, even dangerous. He was equally fearful of humanity, would gnaw on his anxieties and then spit them into my mouth. Our conversations grew, thankfully, more complicated after we stopped having sex as did my capacity for the empathy required to soothe him. To witness may be a kind of sharing, but sometimes sharing is too damn tiresome. There was the woman I went to college with, both of us new to the new city. We went dancing and eventually tossed in the tidal brine of her sheets. She sucked my earlobes like a snail, gripping and gliding. Later it came to feel more like a leech. Look at me, she’d say but that made it even more impossible. She took too much, then laughed at me through the glass of my departure. I learned a lot with her. Lessons in buried nourishment, unearthed by someone who was different from me but also, a mirror—too often cracked in an unpredictable cold.

Somehow, Loie and I had looped back toward the house. I could see the shiny mailbox and uneven driveway in the distance. Last year, my car wouldn’t start. It was the spring after the twins were born. I found a nest the size of a ripe placenta under the hood. I frisbeed the meticulously made thing into a lavender bush and wiped what I recognized as afterbirth on my black leggings. I hadn’t left the house, had not started the poor machine, all winter. Such was the abridged time that had claimed me. Loie shifted her body to focus ahead of her, a tender hum buzzing through her lips. She turned her head toward a pot- bellied man walking some kind of frustrated spaniel on an extendable leash. Howdy. Her voice was as heavy as gravel. Well, hi there. He winked and offered a tip of his ratty hat. I waved but no one seemed to notice.

I was thirsty. She drank from a lidded mason jar, pulled from somewhere while I was watching the man waddle on the other side of the street. Water dribbled down her pimpled chin, between her breasts where it went milky caught in the fine hair there. I smelled shit and honey suckle and I was not thirsty anymore. She shielded her collarbones from the sun and I could see a memory take shape. Between her back teeth, she chewed on a hollow artist who used nude photographs of women to inspire abstract paintings barely reminiscent of a body slick with spit, all open at the knees and elbows. They used to bite her collarbones and leave fingernail smiles in her goose-bumped skin. They would drop her off at her apartment after an all-day session and offer to take her salsa dancing on Saturday. They paid her in cash, when she needed it the most; to model and fuck and sometimes finger her with the soft end of a paint-soaked brush.

I smelled pine needles and turpentine. Loie let out a vaporous noise, part laughter and part ellipses.

Blisters were forming on the backs of my heels, unprepared as I was to walk in circles with her. The skin scraped up and rolled back down with every other step. I was sweating too much. My heart was feverish against my breastbone. I could’ve slowed down, but I was in hot pursuit of this carefree, open at the knees and elbows, woman. And with each beat, her verve teased me forward as the clouds shifted above. Her arms bounced off her slight frame. Those hips, stronger with each step. Uncompromising. I pinched my toes forward, trying to distance heel from shoe. Loie seemed ageless, as much my senior as a reckless, young thing. She was a walking reminder; age is tallied on a scoreboard of responsibility. She has no children, no spouse, no dirty dishes in her sink. She was beyond the concept entirely. Through the pain in my feet and the quiet of our walk together, I grew older and even more worn out. I preyed on the potential of her youngness. I wanted to be just as she was, to linger in that small sensation of returning to, or becoming, such freedom. It was dangerously strong, my need to take hold of that broken bottle kind of free. I was drenched in guilt with this need. I couldn’t stop how good it felt to want to destroy her.

The want was so strong, I forgot the puss collecting in both shoes. I forgot the hour, and the babysitter who, surely, had somewhere she’d rather be. I squinted my eyes to create shadows where I could take off her head and nourish myself from her throat and forget all that I’ve witnessed by cutting out her eyes. Or, take a brick and split her open at the spine; to steal that green, springtime confidence. Cut the lips from her limp face, keep them at my bedside so I could kiss them any time I felt this want. Leave her body slumped against that fence, because she didn’t have to show up for anyone, only me. I tried to slow down to better decide which direction the viciousness was coming from. Murder by exhaustion. A body finally taken by the act of too much witness. Am I the violence or has the violence been done to me?

We walked right by my house. In the distance, I recognized the swinging welcome sign of the cemetery. The mountain breathed above us, opening the tall grasses that spread up the hill, beyond the stones. The sign swung like a giggle. Dying, since 1904. Only then did it occur to me that this is where my children love to run, letting the dew soak up to their knees, throwing palm-sized rocks into the creek lined with the skin of the dead. How odd that Loie should be heading up this westernmost hill, around the bend, a second bend, up and up. This is not where she belonged. We both stepped to the side to avoid the man in a white cowboy hat, thrusting his dick toward us as he rode his lawnmower over the next crest. My jealousy hardened again and faded into a yellow kind of anger because I knew I was too smart to feel this way. She was probably thinking something too simple, something like fuck all men. Or, maybe just to be mindful that she was not followed home, because she knows that violence is always possible. And me? I still wanted to kill her in some slow, liquefying way.

She stopped at the grave of the writer, kicked off her sandals and scraped her toes against the rough granite, whipped smooth by the incessant weed wacker. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words. My skin prickled and I could barely help myself from reaching out and wrapping my wasted wisdom tight around her neck when I heard children running up the road behind us. A gentle wind whisked against the back of my knees, eased an itch there, and my whole being tightened in preparation for greedy, little bodies to overtake me. But they stumbled right past and wrapped their dimpled limbs around her legs, leaning into the final resting place of our favorite dead poet. I watched her molt before my eyes, folding my children into her rib cage, joyfully opening her mouth to their kisses. Her laughter was pure lightning, enough to make all the dead sit up and light a cigarette. My children foraged her body for nourishment, clinging to her with fingernails I should’ve cut days ago. I thought I could feel their hands reaching up and scraping my chest. The blood in my legs slowed as she knelt to their level. They wrestled her down, but I received the flat hit of the ground against my tailbone. Their wet shoes kneaded the scars on my stomach and interrupted my breath even though I wasn’t touching them, even though I could’ve been a thousand miles away and they wouldn’t care. I could taste the buttermilk bruises on their shins as she kissed them between her knees. I heard the delicious sound of their nonsense songs sliding into my ear as their lips knelt into the side of her face.

The sun started to fade. It sent smoky rays through the arches of the front range. When my body moved again it did so with a slowness, relaxed and sleepy, as if about to give birth again. I took a wide circle around the writer’s stone and sat with my back against it. I hoped my sweat could quench the writers long lost words, revive her even. I tightened my lips and smiled, looking up to the purpling sky. On the other side, Loie began to tell a story about a perfectly wasted day while my children braided her hair into the grass.

Loie Rawding is the author of Tight Little Vocal Cords (KERNPUNKT), a Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book of 2020 and finalist for the Big Other Book Awards. Other work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Sand Literary (Berlin), Heavy Feather Review, Another Chicago Magazine, the Critical Flame and the Wanderer, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Loie received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She splits her time between Nashville, TN, where she is a Teaching Artist with The Porch Writers Collective, and the family home on Cliff Island, Maine. For more: www.loierawding.com