—layered one over the other—netted me like a rabbit beside her undressed body laid out in the funeral home. Skin almost translucent, nails bluing at the cuticle. Long and keen those fingers that used to unravel my knotted hair and more than once pinioned me by my wrist or pinched the flesh of my thigh when I had gone too far. Nobody told me in advance how blood pools once the machinery of the heart stops. Nobody warned me that purple would bloom across her back like lilac bundles. I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of it all. Her lineless face. Her utter stillness. And her hands —the only ones I trusted near me as I labored my daughter into this life— hadn’t they always looked just like this? A matrix of silence. A cairn of milky stones.