Hide & Go Seek
for frog skeletons and your brother.

I don’t know why you thought I wouldn’t know where you would be hiding when you tried to run away– I know you said it was hide & go seek but we bot knew we wanted to end up somewhere without a mailbox– I knew where you were because we both painted birdhouses with pomegranate juice we find in the anxious hinge of the refrigerator in July and we lock bed room doors to keep out the noise of the history channel no one is watching in the sun room and we both perch under desk lamps like street lights and imagine the delight of walking down the back road in the flux after it rains– we are addicted to the first two pages of novels and trail off near the last chapter so we can design our own endings– so I knew you would be seated in the back of the birdhouse splattered in orange and red acrylic. You were reading the last sentence of a book you never finished and I told you it was okay and that we could wait there. You told me that you were thinking that you might end up like the frog that ran away when I was three and you were nothing but a potato in a basket– I asked how you remembered and you reminded me how we have always shared memory. You said you think of it’s skeleton often and wonder if it had a sibling who knew where it was running away to and knew that it liked to eat banana bread standing at the kitchen counter and that it sometimes comforted itself with the hinge of the refrigerator in July– I told you that you don’t always need a burial to be remembered that it’s sibling probably put a tombstone where the skeleton was left to fade into the carpet. You said that sometimes you feel like you’re fading into the carpet. I reminded you that you couldn’t even play a game of hide & go seek as long as I was around. You didn’t want to leave the birdhouse so we ate breakfast there standing at the counter with our rustic hunks of banana bread and talked about how there was only enough pomegranate juice left for one of us to have a satisfying glass– neither of us wanted to pour it but we both knew I would get it for you. You said you were sorry like you always do but there was never anything to be sorry for other than leaving the fridge door open in July.