Her Boots

she stood there in those beat-up boots, laces knotted tight, shawl hanging off her shoulders the way a drunk hangs off a barstool — loose, tired, done. out ahead the lake lay frozen solid, a big grey nothing staring back, the closest thing to forgiveness she’d ever been offered.

little flecks of ice drifted in the wind, stinging her face, settling on her lashes till she had to blink the cold away. she thought about the Sistine chapel, for some damn reason — god’s finger reaching out and all that holy horseshit — then about her own life, a crummy little scrapbook of bad lays and worse decisions and a kid she’d given up in a clinic that smelled of peroxide and regret.

she folded the shawl, slow and careful, the way you’d fold something for someone you loved. set it down. peeled off the camisole like she was shedding the last lie she still believed in and placed the boots side by side at the edge, neat, pointing out at the water. let somebody else make sense of it. there was a note in the coat pocket nobody would ever quite read right.

the kid she never had floated up one last time, a small ghost without a face, no blame left in it.

and then —

on the Nordic shore,
two boots placed side by side,
and the lake says nothing.