Esthesis My husband walks every morning. I don't know where he goes, who he meets up with.

I do know that he brings me things as if to prove he wasn't just sitting on a park bench on one side of town or the other. Yesterday he brought me a robin's redbreast. I cried as I put it in the curio cabinet. It was just too close for comfort: those scarlet feathers splayed out in a flower motif, a corsage and pin at a funeral is the image that bit the inside of my blouse. I could see the cat, holding down a wing, that piece of aerodynamic magic as he ripped into the deep ruddy flesh and the harsh sounds stopped coming from the beak, from my throat as silence became the predominate song.