i. You find her in the summertime. She is down near the Gulf beyond the highway billboards that offer penitence to women with healthy wombs. She looks like a poppy field with ripped overalls and thin, Georgia hair and you imagine she will taste like the same cigarettes her mother died on. This is a place you’ll only find behind dancing eyelids, fasting on sleep and long-term memory.

ii. You find her later in the showers of early fall, when the harvest moon carries her over the Mason Dixon line. In a dream, you tattoo a promise you both made across your wrists and you decide you will live there. It is not the first or the last crossed-out promise you both will make together. You tell her you love her the same way Gulf waters love their tropical storms.

iii. Soon, she will be more radiant than you will ever be and it makes you want to sell yourself to her friends with lipstick eyeshadow just to hear her voice on their snowy television screens. She sings like pack wolves howl and you miss the sound when you decide to bathe in your own isolation. Most days, the sound keeps your head above the murky water.

iv. Tomorrow, you’ll watch her through the window, trying to escape that early December rain that clings to her skin where kisses of snowflakes should be. She quit those cigarettes long ago, and she will live longer than you. She keeps those overalls tucked someplace her dead mother would find them and you never see them again. You think you remember the first time you made her laugh like the crickets near the winter pond.

v. She forgot your name some time ago, but in the rain, you think that you can still remember hers.

– Samantha Walsh

*This piece was originally published in Eastern Iowa Review.