It was already full of words. We lived in the index, under wife,
husband, cliché. We had children and the plot thickened.
Mysteries and coming of age stories, study guides and novellas
set abroad. The pages turned quickly at first, a breeze through
the window. Sometimes the plot got stuck and doors slammed.
See also violence, domestic. Then the book seemed endless,
the rooms too small. Suddenly we were growing older. We felt
the pages thinning like trees at the edge of a forest. We didn’t want
our story to end. Who does? We began going backwards, turning
against the page numbers, trying to make them smaller, back to when
we first moved into the house, and it was empty, the walls bare as
the pages between a book announcing its name and speaking its first long sentence.