The Exorcist

The Exorcist

It was never his lips
that conjured it.
Yet the phantom rose anyway: feral, half-formed,
lurking subterranean
behind shadowed eyes,
hooked into her shoulders
like an old superstition
refusing to die.

A parasite of memory.
A revenant belonging to another man.
Still, it clung.

And the exorcist?
He knew. Seeing the way the air changed around her,
the way something unseen
kept its claws in her pulse.

For three hundred sixty-five nights
he came armed
with laughter,
with long walks through wild places,
with tenderness sharp as Psalms,
with dinners planned like ceremony.

Each day he waged
a quiet, brutal war
against a Ghost
that had never belonged to him.

Until one morning it weakened,
faint as breath on glass,
a thinning shadow perched
on the edge of her shoulder
as she stood in the kitchen, unaware.

He stepped behind her, bent low,
and exhaled
the softest command.

The Specter disintegrated.
Ash in the air.
Vanquished.

She turned, startled,
blinking through the absence of the phantom veil:
a nascent vision.

Memories flickered, cinematic quick film cuts:
his hands at the stove,
steam rising,
laughter spilling into the kitchen,
Saturday night dinners looping again and again,
small gestures magnified by time,
his gentleness shaping a life quietly around her.

And suddenly,
from the deep inside,
where the Ghost had been tightly knit
against alabaster bones,
a long, silent heart beat again.