Route 7 Review | Page 121

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.”