enjoy this writing from Christine Stoddard
in the free 6" x 9" 2017 PDF file chapbook: The Eating Game
(click on the front cover image or the
title text to download the free PDF file)
Vanishing Letters
Christine Stoddard
We were high school lovers,
the kind that never fucked.
So I never knew the
depths of her bones.
I never sucked her clavicle
or clutched her pelvis.
But when we graduated,
we wrote each other letters
about the moons’ siren call
and whether puffins danced
until she stopped writing
me any kind of letters at all.
Thirteen months later,
when her mother emailed me
an invitation to her funeral,
I asked why my dear friend
would never see sunlight again.
Her heart failed.
But I adored her, and I always will.
Her heart—the organ—failed.
But she wasn’t sick.
She was sicker than you knew.
She was the kind of young woman
who eschewed premarital romps,
not out of any religious faith,
but out of contempt for her body.
Her wrists had been lace
and her waist made of ribbon.
No fat, only wisps of sinew.
I begged her to love me,
but I never begged her to eat.
