Cremated fingernails or white lily pollen or the dust of tissues at a hundred funerals—though nobody she’s loved has ever died. The mites around her eyes are not doing their job, and she pictures them sleeping at the tips of her lashes rather than dead or gone because she doesn’t understand loss enough to imagine it. Cora’s eyes remain dry, lids sticking audibly, until she tips her chin up to the florescent lights of her apartment bathroom and lets Visine drip in twos and threes. When she is anxious, she picks at the inside corners of her eyes until they bleed—something wet to wash away the dust.
Cora hasn’t cried for nearly two decades. Not since before she could read, and not after the first laws mandating funerals for aborted and miscarried fetuses. It had seemed like everyone was grieving something back then. Her uncle was a funeral director and her father a self-proclaimed entrepreneur, so to make extra money they listed Cora’s services at funerals—some smaller echo of professional mourners from cultures older than their own. Cora became a checkbox on a form for additional options, right below “electronic memory board”. For two years she floated fairy-like about those heavy rooms as great aunts crooned their necks and grieving mothers lifted her into their laps, drying wet cheeks with her toddler curls.
Now, Cora eats hot peppers, cuts boiler onions dangerously close to her face. She watches Bridge to Terabithia and Marley & Me, but she’s never had a sister or a dog so these do nothing for her. She takes a bath with the lights off until her palms wrinkle. She lets the water drain around her as she feels the weight of herself slowly return. She thinks of the saddest moments of her life. When her apartment manager discovered her cat and forced her to return him to the shelter after she’d raised him from a kitten. Her father’s face when she dropped out of grad school. Yesterday, when her girlfriend packed up to move to Colorado and told Cora she was nothing but hollow inside. Cora lies at the bottom of the tub, and even with her hair spidered around her shoulders and water pooled in her bellybutton, she feels wrung dry. She picks the scabs around her eyes, lubricating.
Hayli May Cox holds a PhD in Creative Writing with a graduate minor in Women's and Gender Studies from The University of Missouri and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Waldorf University. Her art and prose have found homes in places like Brevity, DIAGRAM, and Black Warrior Review. A Michigander by birth, in her free time Hayli paints clouds, builds LEGO forests, and hikes around with her leggy dog.