Cathy Dies
You haven’t killed yourself because you’d have to commit to a single exit. What you wouldn’t give to be your cousin Catherine, who you’d watched twice in one weekend get strangled nude in a bathtub onstage by the actor who once filled your pre-teen fevers with lush-lipped Britishisms. Backstage, he talked to you without his hairpiece and was unafraid of how your eyes measured his skull. Law & Order: Criminal Intent put her severed head in a bucket, pulling the towel back on her clotted bangs a second before the cut to Honda’s Year End Clearance Event. And you swear that was her Cygnus-tattooed calf flailing on the SyFy Network as the mutated piranhas swarmed like sexed-up galoshes. Some days, you’re convinced she’s the blur of the passerby behind the city comptroller interviewed on the 11 o’clock news, the last lighted window squinting on the high-rise, the silhouette the pigeons spatter over the elevated subway platform in Astoria where the bakery underneath releases the ache of its scent which anyone it touches will eventually die from, the ache of how it can do nothing but ascend. She’s been nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of the concerned line between your doctor’s eyebrows as he listened to the giant, sodden moth trapped between your shoulders, the ruin you carry around with you like a speech you’re always prepared to give. How you’re prepared to be Woman at Bottom of Ravine, T.O.D. unknown, Woman Found in Motel Room and It’s a Goddamned Shame, Understudy to Woman Overdosing, Woman in the Prop Photo in the Wallet Catherine takes out of her coat and lays gently on the balustrade before the black sky pours down its scroll of names.