The last door open

Seven exhibits in a brown folder on my bedside table and the stamp still visible under the lamplight. I bent the marigold corner and sent it anyway. The clip is priced. The cousin's deadline passed and I did not answer. The alley door is open and I am lying here without the phone in my hand for the first time in weeks and the last hour of September is outside where anyone could walk in and the gold kada is on the table beside the folder and I am not setting an alarm.

I keep thinking about the word evidence. My body, assembled into evidence. The forearm under the bandage, the wrist from Day 28, the shoulder welt from the night I told no one about. I photographed what I did not report and I reported what I could not fix and now it is all in one folder and the woman at the station looked at the pages like she was reading a story about someone she almost believed. Heena was there. Heena watched me say it out loud. Seven marks. Seven. I did not know there were seven until I counted them just now, lying here, and that is the part I will not recover from — that I had to count.