The Mark Twain Museum and the Boy with Expensive Skin

By Tessa McHattie

Floating through this humble, historic house. A ghost from the future in a home of the past. Overhearing counterfactual retellings of once-truths twisted by the days. They say Mark Twain was four feet tall. Hence the small doorways, and proclivity for caves. But if he were here now, he would say that these walls are brown. And I would agree. I’ve lived my own orchestrations, where I’ve wandered your first apartment again. Savoring the raspberries on French toast gone by, and the first terrible song we fell in love to. Memories whipped into a foam for a bath sweet and blue. Fingers dancing through the mist like the night we drove drunk, bucking and wilding. We fought the whole way home. Do you remember it that way? I ask lamely to a chair, another ghost lingered too long in the house where Mark Twain used to live, cry, and sleep. The frozen frame so far away I don’t look like myself. A perfectly weathered book placed at an angle on the nightstand. Alone in the house. The things we used to do. The pain, warm. The walls, blue. Like the ocean. Like the things we thought would stay.

Author Bio: Tessa McHattie is a Canadian writer residing in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lost Balloon, The Disappointed Housewife, and Shoegaze Lit.

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