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I play house with my emotions. I’m married to responsibility, my better half. She shows me everything I hope for, the virtues I can not will into being. She recently gave birth to our child, I call her innocent. A concept I have to learn again as we move into our new home. It’s sky blue. My wife takes care of our garden, snipping the thorns from the rose bushes while my daughter cries to her from the window. I watch from the couch behind both of them. What am I doing? I’m always afraid when I hold her. My wife tries to teach me how, I never learn. My wife says I’m too stubborn. I need to get away. I’m wasted in a drinking contest with a biker. The bar is stuffed with leather-bound, beer bellied, bums. My ass gets kicked twice tonight — once in the contest, again outside after I call him a bitch. I swing, I miss. I throw up on my shoes. My wife is here to pick me up. She’s always here to pick me up. Innocent is buckled in the backseat, I look at her. Blood runs from my nose, I breathe and it bubbles around my nostrils. To her, it’s a funny face. I go home and give us a bath. She blows mountains of foam. She gives herself some hair, a beard, like me. Like she grew old. It is a funny face. She always thinks the soap is sugar until she tastes it; the bitterness of shiny things. It’s the next day and I’m sober. I decide to surprise my wife with dinner— I lose track of time, I have to pick her up from work, I’m already late, I turn everything off, unfinished, and leave. By the time I get halfway there she calls me saying “forget it, Im just gonna take the subway.” I say “let me pick you up at the next stop.” She says “forget it.” At least dinner’s cooking. I go home and find nothing left. Only a crowd of fire engines and ambulances. One medic is carrying a bag the size of a bottle, a biohazard symbol branded on it. They won’t let me see. They say there is nothing to see. All I find is grief in these ashes. All I find is myself. Who I am. Flinching at embers, hoping it’s my baby coming home. It was just the wind. Do I wait for responsibility to come back and fix everything? To glue these shards back together? To rewind these piles before time tore them down. Down, to where I’m left. Now, I sit and pile ashes up around my feet. Nothing left but this knot in my shoes. The tips of my laces poke through— A knot I tied years ago and haven’t touched since. I tie my knots tight, and I stand by that. I might hang by it too. Hung by my stubbornness, my thoughtlessness. Hung by my zeal. Hung by my rush. This is where our living room used to be. My daughter’s rocking horse— beige with a white nose, teetering by the window. Light would shine through its mane in the evening, diffracting brilliance. Now, it is black and sits with the foundation of our home. The specks of misery sift through my fingers like memory. When we brought her home from the hospital, The day of blood and shrieks that birthed our angel. Angels were born from the flames. My angel was taken by them too. “The quickest fire” they said. The brightest angel, Rolling in these ashes like a sandbox. And responsibility will flood back to me After the loss of our child. Could we have another? I could never regain my innocent. May she be born again from the rubble by something other than grief. By a more worthy father.