The Body

The body arrives at nine o’clock in the evening, and the neighbors do not seem to rustle their curtains. John Patrick Henry sighs, soft, above the music of cicadas and tires against warm, wet pavement.

“You need help getting it inside?” the delivery man asks, and John Patrick Henry looks at the delivery man and observes that his face is unnaturally impassive. He must know what is inside the box. He must know there is no it but a she, naked, flesh perhaps still jiggling from the motion of transport from truck to doorstep. John Patrick Henry swallows.

“No,” he says to the delivery man.

“Sign here,” the delivery man says, still impassive, and John Patrick Henry signs, signs away, signs Jonathan Patrick Henry, and the lines wobble from his shaking fingers. He leaves the pen on the clipboard to keep the delivery man from seeing him tremble.

“Goodnight,” John Patrick Henry says, and the delivery man looks at the long wooden slats of the delivery box, and looks at John, and seems for a moment to pause, as if to insist, as if to suggest she is too heavy for John to carry alone. Instead, the delivery man snorts and spits into the garden and strides back to his truck.

John Patrick Henry waits for the truck to rumble, for it to pull from the curb, before he drags the box in. His arms tremble now, and he casts quick glances to the brick houses around him, to their closed window shades. They do not shift, even when the wood scrapes against his front steps, and John’s eyes prick with tears at the scent of cedar soaring high, high above wet pavement.

He thought he would be calm, he did not want to scare her, but his right eye begins to twitch. His palms sweat and slip around the box; he moves to push instead of pull, closes the door behind himself and collapses on top of her wooden crate.

“I love you, I love you,” John Patrick Henry whispers between the slats. There is a crowbar on his dining room table, positioned there just for this purpose, but John Patrick Henry inhales deep. He pulls at the wooden slats with his bare hands and they slip but they loosen the nails, and the slats break in jagged pieces as he yanks at them. “I love you,” he says, as he pushes away wooden debris, and packing peanuts, and uncovers a pair of perfectly formed feet from beneath it all. The toenails are red and he strokes them with his shaking fingers.

John Patrick Henry breathes deep, and he rises to his feet. His knees creak, and he is embarrassed to be old in front of her, and so he is ginger in his movement toward the crowbar. He is ginger, too, as he lifts the crowbar from the table and returns to her. He presses it carefully against the slats by her head, levers it up, up against each one.

Like beams of light between window slats, her face shines. It beams up at him, still, through the splintered wood and packing peanuts. “I love you,” he says, and she does not flinch, or breathe, or speak. She lies wordless in her box, and the smell of silicon rises above the smell of cedar, and John Patrick Henry’s face grows warm and wet with tears.