Love Letters of the Angels of Death Read Online Free

every day are almost over. In the quiet and the dimness, you’re pressed against me so closely that I don’t have much of a sense of the form or texture of your body anymore – only its heat.
    Even though you’re not quite a full year younger than me, neither of us doubts for an instant that you will outlive me. Maybe it’s based on nothing more intuitive than the fact that I’m the male in this marriage. But somehow, we both know that eventually you will be left alone with the two-hundred-pound unanswered question of my corpse.
    â€œSo – there is one more deathly thing we need to talk about,” you’re saying now. When you move against me to look up at my face, I can discern your shape again – yours and a trace of the baby’s too. The tips of your fingers lightly press the top of my hand, tracing the bones beneath the skin and veins. My hand-bones spread out in rays, spanning the distance between my wrist and knuckles.
    â€œI wish I knew what it would take to get one of these bones out of your hand after you’re dead – before I put you in the furnace,” you say. “These bones here – they’re the perfect size for keeping...”
    I laugh and tell you I don’t think it would be legal – something I’ve heard mentioned in crime stories on the radio about “offering an indignity to a dead body.” I think it’s an indictable offence and everything.
    You’re getting angry, dropping my hand onto my chest, leaning away to prop yourself up on your own elbow. “So the state will take your dead body, cut it just about in half to let a stranger help himself to, like, your entire liver, or whatever. But it wouldn’t give your own wife one little bone out of your hand? Not even if you wrote instructions for it in your will?”
    I don’t know, of course. How could I? I fold my hand into a fist and raise it in front of my face where I can see its outline in the near-dark of the northern summer’s all-night twilight. You’ve always had a – thing – about my hands. You call them the perfect archetypal male hands.
    â€œThey’re like the ones drawn in old anatomy textbooks or in art classes or in religious kitsch,” you’d say.
    â€œThey just look like regular hands to me,” is what I’d say.
    And then you’d roll your eyes and tell me, “That is exactly what I mean.”
    Knowing your fetish for my hands, maybe I should have expected to hear something like this from you all along. I open my palm and find the back of your head where you’ve lain down again with your ear on my ribs.
    â€œYour heart always beats so slowly in there,” you say, not mad anymore. “It must be humungous.”
    All your yellow hair is draped over my chest like a spider’s web. You haven’t bleached any of those trendy white streaks into it – the ones you’ve started referring to as “turn-of-the-century skunk-hair,” as if they’re already dated. I don’t really care what colour your hair is as long as you don’t cut it too short.
    Remember that total stranger who rounded on you in the lineup at the grocery store to tell you how selfish it was to keep your hair long while you had little babies in the house? She said she’d heard of a baby once who got a piece of long hair wrapped around his pudgy finger so tightly and for so long that the whole thing had to be amputated. Poor little guy couldn’t even remember having that finger. Sure, it’s a sad story – if it ever really happened – but I just comb my fingers down the length of your hair and hope for the best.
    Should I ask you why you’re afraid you won’t be able to love me anymore after I’ve gone all dead and abstract? Is that why you want to take something concrete out of my body to keep with you until you’re dead and abstract yourself? But I know you’d