after John Everett Millais Incapable of our own distress, we cache our doubt in her floating marvel of a gown. No death should ever be this beautiful. Complicit in forget-me-nots, we drown in the language of flowers, glory in the flash of her cheek against dark wet. Her pallor pulls us down to savage depths of white. Alive, she’d be less wonderful. The model took a four-month bath, fully clothed, and shook with chills Millais ignored. Beauty thrives in fevered minds. Ophelia infects the facts we were so certain of; our heads grow petal-rotten, and life seems incorrect. We want our lush ghost. We want her dead.