When there was no further recourse, I sent her flowers, expensive specimens hand selected by a homosexual man on the other side of the phone who liked to bind twigs around his vases – his natural signature. When there was no recourse, she would call me, thank me. Then we would renew again, our flawed courtship.

I never specified the flowers, leaving everything to the nice man on the other end of the phone, only demanding that he charge me no more than the maximum cost for purchase and delivery. She never told me, the many times I sent her flowers, what flowers she received, only that she liked them very much.

She told me always what she did with the vases, after the expensive flowers died. She broke them and chose the large shards of glass to construct a sharp, unforgiving version of myself, without my wicked tongue and unforgivingly passive personality. She looked forward to my flowers, she said, so that she could add to her jagged rendition of me. She loved it, she said, because it was nice to her and forgiving of her flaws. I am, too, I implored from my prison cell; by then she had hung up the phone.

She came to visit recently, wounds up and down both arms, also on her face. I asked what those are from. She said she fell in love with the other me, made love to the other me.

She smiled, her lips bloody. I’m lonely, she said.