A Thousand Breaths

Button, brow, grave, rock – puzzles for expert solvers. Were they actually riddles or had savage death shaken her so much that she could no longer grasp the meaning of “it is done” and the measure of the “done deal”? She touched Stelios’s white shirt, unwashed since the summer. Greedily she smelled the yellowing stains of his sweat at the armpits, kissed the collar like she was kissing his throat. You, I have no intention of sticking in the laundry, she whispered, and then swung around and stared into the mirror. She longed to find her husband’s face there, to see his eyelashes fluttering, the veins in his neck bulging and then receding as alive as could be. She would rest her fingers on his head, correctly measuring the width of his brow, the distance from his eyebrows to his hairline. She waited and waited, but on the glass there was only her broken face and her blurred gaze. She, Pigi Voyiatzi, she who read the eyes of others, was riveted there for twenty minutes and couldn’t read her own. She felt her chest and her head burning while her legs were frozen stiff, another person from the waist up, another from the waist down. She closed her eyes and whispered six curt words. I don’t know where to be.