Book III: The Conjoined
And it’s been several months since Abby went dead. Jessica has entered this urine—this life—and she has conjoined me to a kernel of Being. Jessica is quite lovely, my wife dead and all. We have developed a habitual life. We have developed a relationship. I don’t know how this normality seems to me, except, well, there. Coffee, breakfast, feeding Sylvia, TV, the occasional novel, newspapers, a brief phone call from the detectives, mother cavorting with the church peeps, all the silence that has become us. (Abby and her bra which I keep hidden under the floorboards with the thumb-dot of blood above the breastbone. The fragrance of Abby’s shampoo still in the drain. Her hairbrush under the bed where Jessica cannot get to it.) Mother bumbles about upstairs, but I belie
