The Bluestone Review Spring 2022

Obituary By Mary Ann Honaker for Theresa McCauley The skirt she gave me hangs dumbly in the closet, an obituary. “I don’t have many female friends,” she said, true also for me, so how we gravitated to one another is astonishing. I dreamed she told an off-color joke and I laughed until I cried: she won’t be telling another. What happened to her leather jacket, trimmed in teal green about the lapels, 7-up dot painted on the right back corner? I would love to wear it. I bought a purse and boots in red plaid, of which she would approve. She gave me a gray plaid hat with fuzzy earflaps. She gave me a turbo scratcher when I adopted a new cat. She gave me a pair of black patent leather flats. Her gifts are everywhere I look. I don’t have many female friends. We should be driving to the or chard to pick apples for baking, she should be handing out

to employees at work. We should be laughing on a bus, she should be mothering the young punks in the Pit, but the Pit has changed and the homeless and odd have been driven away; there’s only memories under neon beside the sizzle of traffic, us cackling at how I could lick the tip of my septum ring. The story where she broke the windshield of a guy who tried to drag her into his car, whipping her ringed bondage belt free and slapping it down hard, like Putang! Bang! Her yelling, “We need a jump!” in the center of the street, stopping traffic when my car wouldn’t start. “It’s a girl!” she’d cry after squeezing out of the back seat

of that two-door, because getting out was as difficult as being born. Watch me build this shrine of objects and words, see how it can’t bring her back. Sometimes I wear my Docs unlaced in her honor.

ridiculously delicious red velvet cupcakes

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