The Dead Woman’s Daughter
2 Minutes Read Time
She is an insomniac, small and bumpy, with an iceberg foot and a
peavey for a crutch. She used to live above me, she and her husband,
a retired butcher who is very kind. One morning she came to my
door to say Sorry about the thunder, you can see I broke my foot, can’t
you? Her name is Jane, and as it happens she is the daughter of
another Jane who also lived above me. That other Jane had a sawed
heart. She kept a bull terrier whose marvelous sperm everybody
tried to get her to sell, but she never would. Then she turned up
dead on the floor of my ceiling. I don’t know what happened to
the dog. Recently my Jane moved away; she did not tell me good-
bye. Soon afterward a metal barge appeared on the curb, and for
days many lumbering men fed it garbage bags full of obituaries
and other kinds of frozen meat, like rugs and lamps. I could hear
the men above me, breaking up the orphaned furniture with ice
picks and cleavers. Then they lowered the bags to the curb with
ropes and threw them one by one into the barge’s maw. At night,
after they left, a sea of blue vinyl lapped over its hunger. Jane has
gone far away now, so has the barge, and sparrows settle on the
curb like flies.
Read more from Issue 16.1.
