LOUISA HOWEROW Visitation We are in our church elder’s basement, drinking his not-quite-hidden booze, the pretty coloured sweet liqueurs. One of us talks about the dead man’s shotgun, its highly polished stock. I liked his dog, a girl whispers, a setter. Another dips one finger at a time into her crème de menthe and sucks. She starts a joke, forgets how it goes. We do not ask each other if or how we left our bodies in this house, how we let things be done to them. We will learn all this later. Now our parents are upstairs. We don’t care if they find us, know they won’t, wish they would. We want to be infants, again. We will not tell our children any of this, but we will fear for them and they’ll wonder why.
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