The morning’s face is very pale when I run into you. All its blood has flushed into me, and I do not know what to say. My hands, clasping together, sculpt silent apologies. Left hand twists the right. Right thumb digs left palm like a dumb dog in the backyard, sniffing and sifting through lines and scars to find an empty spot and bury a bone-white fingernail. I enact the rituals you once performed with overtones, now, of savagery: where your hands once glided, barely touching, so as not to disturb the gorgeous slumber of each curve but only to brush across its breathing, I twist, now, like an angry insomniac twists her sweaty sheet, hundreds of hours into hot not-sleeping.

I lock and tighten my hands, my eyes trained on you. And pressed between my palms, I know, in the tiny spaces between the hollows of my palms, little glass sculptures are forming: moments of air so tightly compressed that they swell into substance and meaning. I squeeze harder to feel the pressure and shape of their bodies against my hands. They are burning red when they flash through the atomic gaps between my fingers, like sunrise slicing through morning window slats. Furtively, when you are not looking, I slip the sculptures into my pocket, achingly aware that they are not to be shared.

There, they tinkle and giggle and talk together as if they were beautiful, wise women at a Bible study. Keeping an eye on you, I strain to catch what they are saying. It is too much. It is too hard. My eyes wander. I turn and leave.

I step carefully on my way home, both hands in my pockets, passing their little figures through my fingers and lightly cupping them -- as if they were precious, spillable spring water -- when I run across the last intersection before my home (they titter, a little derisively, at these precautionary measures). I still run, even though I should know I'm safe by now. When I cross my threshold, they silence their own voices forever. Their blood stills, dries, evaporates. I am their lips and tongue. I bow my head.

Arriving to my room, I kneel by the window and take them out, one by one, their tiny tinkling shapes, and lay them carefully upright on the sill, side by side, like they are sea glass I hunted for and prize.

They are infinitely precious.

I touch them like you once touched my hands, marveling with dove-eyed delicacy, afraid to tarnish.

In the window, a slow sunset: the light changes from white to red as it dips down further and further through their bodies like so many bloody marys being drunk by quiet, nursing ghosts. When night falls and they are finally emptied, I turn each upside down over my outstretched, cat-pink tongue and tap its base with one long index finger to catch any last drops of blood that the ghosts might have left. I do it casually, in case they are watching, like it is for the sake of cleanliness and not because it is the only thing in my life with color precious and immortal. If they knew how I crave it, they might be more careful not to leave any. I don't know why they would, it is only a superstition, but I stay on the safe side and play it coy, just in case. The ghosts so rarely leave anything, anyways.

Having utterly expunged the bloody pulp of our interaction, licking what was left me from the corners of the glass, I take the newly clean and crystalline statues (blanched yellow in the artificial light) and place them, at random, in different positions in my room. I rest one on the mantelpiece, upright, and consider its figure there for a moment before swiftly taking it up again and placing it somewhere else. I am seldom satisfied. Sometimes I hold two so that they face each other and move them slightly as if they were talking together, and whisper two parts to a conversation for them, glancing over their heads at myself in a mirror. But even though I'm the one who speaks -- even then! even then! -- I still cannot make out what they say to each other. Absurd. I swish the drops of bloody from right to left inside my mouth. I set them down and watch myself for a moment. I'll wait to swallow.

One sculpture, I leave to play with last, and I carry this to my bed and lay it sideways on my pillow. I have done this so many nights now that little glass figurines cover my entire mattress and there is nowhere left for me to lie down. So I sit cross-legged beside the bed, resting my chin on the edge of the pillow, and I watch the glass sculpture lying on its side for a little while, sometimes imagining, between long, slow blinks, that I can see it breathing a little bit.

It is infinitely precious.

Once I am satisfied of its slumber, I rise and pick a precise path between the glass figurines of so many years covering the floor. I place my feet deliberately in the ever-diminishing spaces between them and make it to the door, where I turn and survey them for a moment, my finger on the light switch. They are gathered in thick swathes now, like a tiny terra cotta army, and the places where my feet fit between them are very small and far apart. Soon there will be no way of getting through them anymore.

I'm not sure what I will do then -- I could, cross-legged, encircle myself with their worshipful forms, like a shrine or a museum, and never leave. There are enough ways to arrange and rearrange them to keep me occupied unto decay. Maybe even the older ones, when placed on the windowsill, would fill up and empty with precious color, too. I've never tried that before. Maybe I could figure out a way to beat the ghosts to that blood and have it all to myself. I flush to think of such excess --a full glass! I would be drunk for weeks on just one.

I shake my head.

I don't think I deserve that.

I could leave the room utterly, and never come back, start a new room, maybe make new shapes with my palms. I have been making these for a while, and though they are mysteries, I know the questions they make me ask well. I love them, but I have been asking these questions so long…

It could be nice to start a new room. It wouldn't be the first or second time, I know the way now, I could start right away, no more scary nights of almost-emptiness needed.

Or I could consecrate the dark temptation that sometimes flits through the sacred glass hours, probably on the wings of the same drunken ghosts that blow tiny gusts on the glass when I am not looking. They do this so that the figures are in slightly different positions when I turn back to review and I never have quite a fully working knowledge of where everything is, even though I was the one who put it there (the ghosts try to trick me but I trick them too, pretending I don’t care about the leftover blood).

This sudden-coming thought of probably scheming ghosts is to, one night, not pick a path between the glass, but rather to dance wildly across it, not watching my step at all, so that I crush it into shards and then dust beneath my bloody feet and then I would lay in my bed and roll all around, roll all the glass beneath my warm, flexible body and it would tremble and shatter beneath me and fragments would glue to my skin, sticky with blood. Then, the ghosts whisper, I could just drink that, not in droplets from the bottom of glasses but in massive, sweeping laps of the tongue, a great glut of poetry and life and it would all be my own, my very own -- not the carcassy leftovers of my rivals -- my own, my ending and my beginning and my middle, all self-contained, all infinitely looping.

I shudder with almost unbearable pleasure at the presumption.

I sweep my gaze across all the glass on the floor and on the bed.

It is infinitely precious.

I finger the light switch and flick it. I close the door delicately, tongue between my teeth as I turn the knob, willing its own tongue to slide into the latch as quietly as possible. But my hand slips. The knob jumps. The latch screams. The ground shakes. The glass shudders and screeches from inside the door. My teeth bite down on my own tongue in horror. The tongue severs. My mouth floods with blood. I swallow, reel, and collapse.