In the House

by the Sea BY STACIE CASSARINOI admired the sea, most days,but not the heirs or millionairessailing in stiff-capped winds,buttoned for summer. After all,we were the spectacle, two womentouching in all the wrong places,furnishing rooms with no childrenin the hull of a house gone still.She had some guns, a half-missingfinger, an eye that pointed.Sometimes you need to be shot, she’d say.I hardly remember her name.How the sky came in obliquelythrough the window.How the skiffs were a study in silence.How I hid my body in a bathtub.What she meant was sometimes you’re hardto love. And that one nightI swore she was comingfor me, I just turned over and took it— and beyondthe blindless room, a wildnesstoo foreign to name, tomatoes tiedand splitting in the heat, couplessipping the wealth of bivalves, saltof the Sound with open lips, the gnarlof some animal, cocked and on the mark,in the distance a lighthousehaunting whatever darknesswas never ours to begin with.