Todd Dillard
1. THE DISPATCHThe Widower’s Wife Takes Him to This Year’s Death Gala
“Should I go as drowned?” she says, stroking her blue skin. “Or strangled?” A necklace of bruises purples her throat. “Shot?” she says, as bullet wounds blossom on her limbs. “Or,” and her forehead sprouts a crown of broken of glass, “Car crash?”
For hours it’s like this: his dead wife slips into different deaths, and the widower offers polite feedback—too shattered, the smell!, how will you hold a glass like that?—until finally she selects an exotic fungal infection. Her face dims into a pear’s pale green, which makes the black of her hair and eyes deepen.
He wears his wedding tuxedo—navy, with a silver silk lining. She attaches a dead lily to his lapel with a bobby pin, her body’s cold heavy against his skin. The urge to forgive her for leaving burns in his chest. As she straightens the flower, his hands dock on the small of her back.
Outside, a car horn brays. “Our ride,” she says, pulling away. The husband glances out the window. From the driver’s seat of a white Rolls Royce Phantom a skeleton waves.
At the gala, skeleton waiters in mausoleum-gray suits accented with scarlet sashes ferry hors d'oeuvres on silver trays—gauzy balls of light that, when eaten, summon fragments of childhoods: skinned knee, red balloon, beach day.
He meets his wife’s new friends: dead admirals in tasseled jackets, flapper dancers with opioid lips, immolates with scythe-bright grins. “What do you do for a living?” he keeps nervously asking, and the dead burst out laughing. They call him, “Such a breather.” They ask his wife how she could have ever left him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, scanning the room.
He’s been chatting with a poltergeist dressed like a cowboy—I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a break from all that chain rattling—when the widower realizes he hasn’t seen his wife for some time. He excuses himself and searches the party, through rooms decorated with blood fountains, a theater where a silent film of a dead whale being harvested by ocean floor fauna plays at x100 speed. Panicked, he bumps into a passing waiter, who drops a tray of shot glasses filled with baby cries—party-goers around him pause as the sounds of weeping bouquet the air—the astronaut beside him removes his helmet—crabs spill from his mouth—the astronaut takes a deep breath and sighs—
When he finds his wife, she’s stepping in from a balcony, a fresh cut on her cheek. “Are you OK? Where did you go?” “It’s nothing,” she says, touching the wound. No blood; just a slash of maroon like a fresh tulip bud. The widower glimpses a cloaked figure behind her, past the balcony door, watching.
Slow dances, string music, many rounds of toddlers’ first snows. The widower falls asleep on his wife’s shoulder on the ride home.
When he wakes up, he’s in his bed, tux crumpled on the floor, along with his duvet and sheets. His wife’s dress is draped over the bathroom door. A touch of cold, like a kiss from a snow-eater, lingers on his cheek.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYThe Children
Magic: the Gathering EDH Deck (Meren of Clan Nel Toth)
Work laptop and gaming computer
Acoustic Bass (Isabella) and Acoustic Guitar (Francine)
Books (D&D manuals, Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, Actual Air by David Berman, Lace and Pyrite by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Scribbled in the Dark by Charles Simic)
3. BIOGRAPHYTodd Dillard's work has appeared in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart After Dark, Sixth Finch, Barrelhouse and elsewhere. His debut collection Ways We Vanish (Okay Donkey, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. He lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife and two children and works as a writer for a hospital.