Milk Blood Heat

ut the past didn’t come. There was only this new wife, skeletal and knowing, grinning down at him in the dark with what seemed like contempt.

She latched her lips to his and Fred felt he could taste the sickness in her mouth.

Over the years, he’d let Gloria fill the rooms with art and plants and rare books, since she couldn’t fill them with children. I

She said it was her last-minute souvenir, like Haha, what’d you bring me back from Cancerland?

She looked like a child dressed in her mother’s clothes, and in that moment, he loved her terribly.

because even in the dark she’s incandescent.

There are no shadows under Zey’s words, nothing hidden, and in that openness, the boy opens too, his fear escaping bravado and legacy to surface on his face.

She wishes this moment of connection was enough, but Duck’s waiting and she has to speak. Truth is beautiful, she tells her brother, quoting Emerson, but so are lies.

How they ostracized the woman, conspired to contain her light.

. Addler keeps a word-of-the-day calendar on her desk, so in fourth period, while Zeyah tunes out her teacher’s prattle on American history, she learns new words: censure, vicissitude, caliginous, exegesis. Slick words, shape-shifting, Zey devours them, voracious.