The .38 The first time you unlocked your glove compartment and showed me your secret, I was breathless at what nestled in its box like jewelry. Then, slowly, I grew used to what rode with us, and on clear days, when we’d drive to the beach, I came to understand it preferred its double dark to our light, where you were touching my breasts under my shirt. And as we began to think more and more about our natures (you saw me as glitter flaked off schist, to me you were the gesso angel that brought the annunciation), I decided I was not sorry you kept it in your car, just there, not for anything. Until the March afternoon you took it out, laid it across your hand, and said Have I told you I have bullets? Then the 38 turned rattler across my path, and jealousy crept into me and I wanted it gone. So you put it away, and it went back to sleep. And one midnight, as we were heading home, south on 101, lights all around us, as if we had been sent to the sky, I felt my nipple diminish as it tightened, and I thought, because this was my first time, Yes, I will marry you. But I didn’t say it. So you had to pull up to my parents’ house in your red Mercedes that summer evening and demand, Come now. But my parents and I were leaving. You drove off, washed in the scent of gardenias at the top of our garden. The rest of this is for the 38, because even your ashes are forty now, and I don’t think you’re listening. I’m sorry, .38. I was wrong. It wasn’t you he craved after all. It was the featherless bird he became when he stepped off the rail. And all the way down to the steel water, he must have been happy as he never was. Oh .38, he has left us both. You were his sister, his mother, his charm. You kept him safe as long as you could.