I push the front door open and step inside and turn on the too bright lights. His things are still here. The cup he last drank out of sitting half empty on the coffee table. His pants crumpled up on the edge of the couch where he usually sits. His manicure set with its black leather case. The green notebook where he collected his favorite jokes printed off the Internet.

Pictures of us hanging on the walls. I move closer to a set hanging over the short book case next to the kitchen door. I study them. The portraits are unreal. The images of him are shells of something imaginary. My face stares at me, lonely, from these snatches of frozen time.

I have just left him at the hospital. They couldn't stop the bleeding. His body is lying there, still, his hands, his chest, his cheeks chilly and pale. How could I leave him there? As I sat on the bus, every block that passed seemed like ten thousand miles more between us. I screamed inside, "Where can I be going without him?" I return to a broken house out of habit, habit that has lost all context.

So drink, drink. I knew we bought this liquor for some peculiar purpose all its own. There's a river in my glass. Time flows differently when I drink.

Six hours ago I'm holding his hand in the hospital, brushing his forehead, and watching his chest rise so gently, so slowly. He can't hear me say, "I love you."

One day ago we are watching our favorite show together, nodding off in the flickering blue light of the television. We have seen this episode many times before. He says, "This is my favorite part," just before he falls asleep.

One month ago we are riding the bus home from work together and watching the blocks pass. He puts on his earphones and complains about the girls sitting behind us laughing too loud and smacking their gum in public, and I ignore his complaints, trying to read a book.

Thirteen years ago he is knocking at my door for the first time, after meeting me at the bar the night before, after taking my phone number and making a date with me for tonight. I open the door and see him under the porch light, bundled in multi-layers of Minnesota winter-proof clothing. I smile at him.

I'm drinking, and finally the empty glass and an empty bottle bring me back to the present, to the ticking of the dining room clock. One hour and six minutes after midnight.

There is a knock at the door. I choose to ignore it.

I have pushed old magazines and unopened mail aside, placed our wedding portrait in front of me on the table. Our smiles are fragile, faded.

There's another bottle in the basement. I stand up, steadying myself, holding the chair. When I flick the light switch in the kitchen there is a violet flash and then darkness. I clomp down the basement steps, leaning on the handrail. I knock over a pile of empty boxes, and lift the bottle off its shelf, weighing it in my hands. There is hissing next to the staircase.

A large, golden cat, fur bristling. "It can't be Diana," I whisper to myself. Diana was run over by a car three years ago. The last time I saw her, her little body was impossibly mangled, so broken I barely recognized her as mine. But in the moonlight shining through the casement, this cat looks like Diana as I always remembered her.

I clump up the stairs and through the dark kitchen toward my seat at the dining room table. There is a knock at the door. But first I drink some more, from the river of time in my glass. The cat rubs its back against my legs purring and meowling, and there is a knock, knock, knock at the door.

When I pull the door open, I see him standing in the snow under the porch light, his skin gray and his only cover against the icy wind the bloody, vomit-stained shirt he wore to the hospital. He enters the house without stamping his feet on the mat, without closing the door behind him. But the cat recognizes him, greets him with a growl. I pull another glass off the cupboard and we sit at the table and together we drink the liquor we've saved for this occasion, drink until time is so thin it will break and the bottle is empty and there is only the two of us, flesh and shadows and cold silence.

"I told you I love you," I say, "But you didn't hear me."

The house is still broken and silent and all the lights are out. We're in the bedroom. Cracked mirror sitting on the floor. Last week the nail fell out and the mirror fell to the floor. The cracks are like a giant crystal spider web.

He sits on the bed and it bends and creaks under his weight. He looks at me in the cold snow-reflected moonlight shining through the blinds, watches me undress, watches my flesh, in the moonlight white except for the dark between my legs. I sit on the bed and move close to him. He is real flesh and bones and blood. I touch his cool, smooth skin. I put my arms around him, hug him against me, feel the solid muscles under his shirt. He lies on his back, watching me as I pull his trousers off.

Flesh and flesh pressed together. Only when I feel the weight of him on top of me, pushing against me, trying to enter me, do I realize that I am suddenly breathing again, that I have not been breathing all night, that ever since I had seen him lying dead in the hospital, I had been swimming like a dolphin deep beneath the surface of time, forgetting to come up for air. But now I can breathe again, and I can cry and shout and laugh again.

I am covered in blood. I thought the wet on me was sweat, but it is blood turning my skin black in the moonlight and staining the sheets. And there is semen on me, the semen of my dead lover mingled with my own.

We make slippery love again and again. At sun rise I fall asleep. I tumble dizzily into oblivion, the bed and the room around it twisting slowly.

When I wake in the afternoon the house is empty and broken and he is gone. I shuffle downstairs, I watch TV, I fall asleep on the couch.

Time stretches out, and day after day is the same.

And each night after midnight, there is a knock at the door, and our cat Diana races up from the basement to meet him.