“You, odious woman!” his wife, now a ghost, snarls at me, and I tell her, “You again? You know you can’t hurt me!”
She floats close to my face, her translucent shape tentacles into my skin, and I feel a shiver traversing my empty chest.
“You stole the love of my life!” she shrieks, her fingers like wind dissolving in the air as she tries to punch me.
“He’s right there,” I say and point to the jar sitting in the windowsill. “I didn’t steal him—you died, remember? You’re the one he loved—look at what he did to me!”
In the shadow, she peers at the jar where her husband has melded into a cavity of decaying heart, the severed arteries limp like cold spaghetti.
He’s moving his mouth, but all we hear are tiny squawking noises like gusts of air pushing against unoiled hinges of a shutter.
I shove the jar into her impalpable palms. “Here, take him back!” The jar shatters near her ghostly feet. The husband-heart flip-flops between us. Farts puff out of the arteries, sending red droplets against the wall and my socks.
“Ugh, I hate it when he does that,” we say in unison, then stare at each other: she, nebulous, me, disgusted. Both of us pinching our nose with our fingers.
“Cauliflowers make him fart!” she says, and I say, “God, he loves his cauliflowers!”
“I don’t want this ugly thing anymore,” she says.
“Me neither.” And I kick it out the window.
We hear a splash, a squeak, a hiss.
The pale moon shines on a cat slinking away, carrying something in its jaws.
