could have doubled as a public service announcement for suicide prevention, he took off his jacket
and used it to provide me with a little extra back
support. At the cemetery, where all my father’s
family are fertilizing their way through eternity,
he humored me when I buried my face in his
chest and screamed,
“Don’t you dare put me in here with them
when I die! You take my ashes to Key West, you
hear me? Key West!” He unzipped his jacket and
used it to muffle my screams and hide the sight of
my father’s casket being slowly lowered into the
earth. I imagined that the ground was alive with a
wiggly mass of worms and maggots that knew my
family and essentially me. Generations of acquiring our DNA through the breakdown of what
happens after we all suffer from inevitable breakdowns. The cycle of biotic decomposition and
generations of faulty cerebral wiring had probably
given birth to one fascinatingly dysfunctional subterranean ecosystem beneath my cheap boots.
“Stop thinking so much,” he said, walking me
to the car. As the door slammed time, in its infinite wisdom, screamed an orgasmic Yahtzee and
spit both versions of myself back to our original
starting points. I heard a kitchen cabinet bang
shut and steady footsteps in the hall.
“Stop thinking so much and come to bed,” my
future husband said, holding a cup of hot chocolate in the doorway.
“Right you are, beloved,” I said, excepting the
beverage.
“Who talks like that? Especially, this late or this
early,” he laughed, looking down at his watch.
“Your future …? He smiled and then filled in
my very last blank.
“Wife.”
Christina Fulton graduated from Florida
Atlantic University with my MFA in fiction. She
is currently teaching at Miami Dade College
North. Her book Dead Ends is available on Amazon. Her nonfiction pieces have appeared in
Sliver of Stone, The Gravel, The Grief Diaries,
and The GNU Journal. “This piece can only
be dedicated to my wonderful husband, Micah
Fulton.”