by Kelly Stern

Friday he has a small fit. He goes through the clothes, makes a pile to give away, makes another of books he'll never read again, but saves the sorting of his papers until the end of the day because he knows what that will lead to.

At first it's easy. Mixed in with the notes, articles, socks are magazines, journals, even a book. These get tossed on the floor in front of the bookcase. Then the photos -- these too are easy. They are recent, but he finds a way to avoid looking at each one. He gathers them and slips them into a photo box. Then things get distracting. A credit card bill from two months ago. She was long gone by then, but the balance he's still trying to pay off was charged on their weekend in Vancouver. Then again, they're just numbers, in a file, done.

Not so with the poems. A whole pile of them. At first he thinks just the top one is hers, and it isn't a great one. But as he gingerly lifts the corner of that one, and then the next, he sees that it is, in fact, a pile of ten or twelve and that some of them had been written for him, about him. He had forgotten, had been flattered at the time, of course, touched. But now, the titles alone make his nose twitch, and he needs to breathe deeply before he can read one all the way through. He expects to hear her voice, but instead sees her hair. Then her lips. He remembers their texture, their faint pink, and he touches the page as if to try and sense them there. And as he moves his finger across the type, he feels the letters raise up ever so slightly. At first, he isn't sure, but when his fingertip pauses on the word "longing," he can actually feel the circles of the o and the g's. When he takes his hand off the page, the indent of the letters on his skin takes a half-second to disappear.

He decides he is losing his mind to nostalgia, and shoves the poems under the bed. Drives to Goodwill to dump his bag of undesirables.

But on Sunday, he sneaks a hand under the bed and pulls the pages out, shuffles to a poem he doesn't want to read to the end. He lays his fingers on the white space in the margin and stares at the words without reading them. Waits. Takes a breath and moves one finger. Feels somehow a sense of gravity, of being bonded to the type, as if he can sense her on the underside of the page, touching the same word from beneath. And then his finger crosses over the word "skinless," gets caught on the k, then slips off the s's. He recoils as if from a Ouija board but is drawn back for the same reason. He tests the edges of the word "watch," picks a little at the tip of the t. Then tries to lift it up, and finds that he can. He turns his hand over slowly, palm up, and there is a tiny black t on his fingertip. He presses it with his thumb, and it transfers. Now he can see the backside, and it seems translucent. He brings his thumb closer to his eye and turns the letter slowly, trying to catch its colors in the light.

And suddenly he smells her, looks up quickly. Breathes in deeply, to fill all of his cells with the scent of her. Traces the smell back to the t, brings it closer to his face again. Slowly extends the tip of his tongue to taste the letter, traces the edges gently. Finally takes it into his mouth, reverently, like a communion wafer. Presses it softly against the roof. Lets it dissolve into a hum.