Last night I killed myself. But don't be alarmed. I took everything with me. I rolled up the front pasture, the loll of the hill, the June apple tree, the yellow doodle bug, the fourth of July dinner on the grounds. I tucked away the old machine shed in the barn you used to climb through, the barn you jumped from, into the bed of the fifty-four Chevy, your ankle twisting between two bales of hay.
Don't worry. I packed up the pine thicket and the hardwoods and the split rail fence your mother built around the old home place. Everything from your hope chest is safe, secured in the little cedar casket with the Smokey Mountains on top. White clapboard and wide mantle, the tin types of your great grandfathers still intact. I packed up the old kitchen table with its side benches, the heavy cabinet full of spider whiskey bottles and depression glass. I folded up the Monopoly board and packed away the endless mounds of popcorn, that red polka-dotted bowl you love so much, the front porch rockers and the Christmas cactus. And I packed up your mother, too. She was still in the bed where we left her, the new bed in the new house, stranger in cedar shanks, absent the old tin roof, absent the family gathered around the table.
All the glassware is here, every arrowhead and shark's tooth, the unused saddle and the porch swing hanging in the family room. Every coffee cup, every chipped, hand-painted plate and mismatched piece of flatware. Everything from the new house, every echo of those years that keep coming back to you, every maniac laugh, every pace of the tile, the dark carpet stain I made, drunk on the floor, your mother leaning over me, then hobbling me to bed.
I even folded away that morning when you told us your secret, after The Upper Room, after the scrambled eggs and wheat germ biscuits, when I pushed back my plate and gave you my father stare. And don't worry. I didn't forget about your brother. I took him with me, so you'll be alone. I blotted both of us out so that finally you are the only thing that's left, the shell that holds whatever you have of us, the trace of the past always in your mouth.