I argue with myself as I leave my house and on the drive to his house and all the way up until I ring his doorbell. The broken blood vessels around his nose are purple in the light that hits him when he opens the door. I follow him up the stairs to his apartment. He is barefoot and his toes stick out at almost a 45 degree angle.

He starts to talk to me about needing new tires for his car. I say, “Shut up. Fuck me.”

We are standing in the kitchen when I say this and so he pushes me against the sink, reaches up my skirt as he drops to his knees, and within seconds it doesn’t matter that he’s racist, doesn’t matter that he’s a Republican.

This morning I told myself I wouldn’t show up here again, but as the day went on I reremembered that my husband was still gone and that he would always be gone and so now I am here, up against the counter in a kitchen that that always smells like nothing, with this ugly man’s tongue working on me.

Now he picks me up in his rosacia covered arms; I am against his basketball belly. He throws me on the bed in the tiny bedroom that always smells like dry attic.

He’s inside me now, condomed, like always. Always has been a year, a year of fucking this ugly, ugly man who is not my husband, my husband, who has been dead for two years, and whose always is that he will always be dead. I scratch this man’s back as I come for the third time this afternoon and I know only that much.