On the day of Kalene's funeral Nicole's insides collapsed. She couldn't link the things in the day together. Everything in that day: At the beginning, a silvery cool morning. At the end, night. In the middle yellow jittery air. On top, the sky. At the bottom, black ground with Kalene in it. During the morning, Kalene's three fat African violets in green plastic pots and water. The row of twenty three ceramic goats. Four with broken legs. Seventeen nail polishes some older than Kalene. The sucking realization that the nail polishes would continue to age but not her sister. The green cotton dress she wore that used to be her grandmother's. The church that smelled like ashes. The people, they all had gray faces. The candles. The casket. The priest, his soft face. The graveyard, the headstones like teeth that eat everything. The gray faced people talking. The bed in the room that still smelled like Kalene.

With her eyes closed at night Francis Rose knew she’d have to reknit her imploded insides and start stitching together a way to enter her future. From now on things would happen in a world that didn’t hold her sister. On the inside of her eyelids everything burned and imploded again into a well that didn’t have a bottom. On the outside of her eyelids was all the space in all the world, uselessly open.