Sunrise
by Ania Vesenny
Today Kira will sip Ben's coffee and feel the daylight creep up her skin. She won't gulp her tea in front of the computer, lurking in bereavement support groups or IM-ing with William. In exchange, she gets Ben. Ben, planting strawberries in their backyard, cradling each seedling, his pale back exposed. His stubby beard against her breasts, his teasing kisses.
Kira beams the flashlight at Ben's IV bag. Hits her toe on the wheel of the hospital bed. She bites her lip, waits for his chest to rise, then pulls a volume of Yeats from under his hand. She will bring it back rustled by wind, dampened by dew.
On the deck, Kira wraps Ben's sleeping bag over her shoulders and folds her hand around his coffee mug. "Super Mom" is written in thin loops on its side. The ocean breeze chills the outside of her palm, but the skin on the inside is burning.
Six years ago, Ben walked in with the mug, hovering over it as though it were a newborn kitten. She tossed it in the sink. "I'm not even pregnant yet!" Ben wouldn't let her throw the mug away even after they'd stopped trying.
She drinks coffee like Ben would've — black. When she scrapes her lips against the cup's chipped rim, the smell of wet animal fur overwhelms her. She takes a sip and squints. Too bitter. Ben called it "bold." She takes another sip, this time slurping, smacking her lips. The coffee coats her tongue like their first kiss in the dark coffee shop in Paris. "Sumatra Mandheling," Ben whispered as his lips brushed against hers. The feathery clouds above the Eiffel Tower grew bristles of sunrise.
Kira hears William's back door. His white T-shirt glows like an abandoned Halloween ghost amidst the gray-over-gray bushes of lilac. He wraps his hands around the wooden planks of the fence. "Was your computer down?"
Kira doesn't want to look at him, even if she knows it's too dark to see his smooth fleshy cheeks, his curls falling onto his shoulders in tight golden ringlets. "I can't even rake a brush through it," he'd said. But he had — the perfect ringlets glistened and bounced on her breasts and stomach.
"It was nothing," she whispers into the mug. "I was lonely, that's all."
No matter how she stares at the rim of the mug, the white spot of his shirt gets only brighter. The sun is about to rise.
"I'm here for you," William says.
"He's better." Kira lifts her hand in a sign of goodbye.
William is gone, but she can't feel Ben's tongue in her mouth, can't hear him say, "I understand. No worries." She splashes what's left of the coffee onto the deck and hurls the cup into the yard. A pea-size snail on the cover of Yeats's volume pulls into its shell, startled by the sudden movement. When she looks at the horizon, the sun is already up.