Electric Blanket

Unreal and thin, its veins rode varicose across the dream-by-dream twisting of the body.

What the last century could offer after the death of monarchy, decades of loneliness. What it could understand about fur, about human touch. What the last century could offer as solace or reparation, the daytime darker now than night, every river on fire.

Separate controls. What an arguing couple could agree on. A system of lightning strikes issued by the hand.

Left on the curb, a quarter at the Salvation Army, three days later under a bridge, on the back of a runaway, where it does not work.

Radiation streamed from it, we thought, taking X-rays as we slept. Somewhere God held up our slides to the light, examining lungs, the cloudy weather patterns of a soul. We would glow for him, we thought, saying his name before we drifted. We would glow for him toward the private jungle where the negative froze black with terror or, overexposed, went white-hot with longing.

When our sister found him, curled blue and fetal under the blanket, she turned the dial back to zero, toggled off the tiny red light that had lit his last way to the bathroom and back. In the blanket’s electric grip, one last comfort overtook him before the heart stopped beating and there was no way left to keep out the cold.