Dear Wigleaf,

I'm writing to you from the sofa I found abandoned in her apartment. When I broke in through the window — I always told her to get burglar bars installed — I saw the sofa in the living room, brown pleather, armless. She'd knifed a hole into the underside of all the cushions, and when I reached my hands inside, I pulled out foam, fistfuls on the floor like ground beef. I remember she once told me that her mother hid all her money curled up in the body of a dented hairdryer. She thought that no one would ever steal something broken. I told her that my grandfather buried gold bars in the courtyard of the apartment complex and bragged about it at a card game, and afterward they stabbed him and took shovels to the courtyard but found nothing. I could have told them that. The only gold he grew was the tray of rapeseed flowers on his balcony, but no one wanted those. No one wants to encourage thirst.

Whatever she hid in those sofa cushions, I never found it. But I called my brother to help me drag that sofa home, down the stairs, and I never stitched up the holes in it. I see her scissoring open the cushions, her hands churning up the dark, and I remember her fingers inside me, the way she licked them in the light. And I wonder what she left inside me, all these years, that I still can't say.