The Uneaten Pear
It was the perfect pear—blush-plump cheek and tear-juice flow—the one your mother and I peeled, sliced, fanned on a white plate, offered to you because you said I’m hungry and you craved something sweet. You lifted one cold finger of fruit to your lips, fell asleep, the white sheet pulled flat across your missing breast, the plate on your chest rising and falling with your slow sweet breath. The cancer reduced you by half, half again, when not long before we’d walked five miles every day, heaviness of our bodies like lead. How concerned to shave those extra ounces because our husbands turned away too soon from us at night, slept the sleep of the dead. We disappeared a little more each day.
In the end you filled yourself up until your skin—fragile container of the body—peeled away, the fluid seeping and you were so thin, your skull shone through your skin, your wrist became three bones lined up neatly the way we were taught to sketch the skeleton’s hand in Drawing 101—bones first then skin, fingers curled in—as in a hand at rest. We were also taught that as the body ages, the fingers curl ever farther inward, holding themselves like dead leaves. So when the undertaker arranged your white hands on the white sheet beside your body, straightened each finger one by one, I counted your bones, noticed only then that your hands uncurled because you’d never grow old enough to die.