Her first date was a picnic at the cemetery just off the highway. Gray wind and yellow grass. She was a preacher’s kid, but there was a certain kind of person she wanted to be. The boy she was with sang in the school choir; blond and polite, scared of his father. He was easy to impress. It was autumn and too cold to smell anything. They ate their drive-thru like it was newspaper to a fire. The only other person there touched a curved stone before cradling their stomach with both arms. They left and didn’t come back. She took chalk and made illicit gravestone rubbings while her choir boy watched, part of her certain that the inscriptions would tell her something secret. Pressing the butcher paper flush to “beloved husband” and “never forgotten” and “lives on,” she felt the words “obsessed” and “eternal” and “Heathcliff.” She closed her eyes and knew the breeze was a ghost kissing her. She bit her lips and concentrated on the sensation of fingers combing through her hair. She let the choir boy hold her hand, silently praying don’t worry, he doesn’t mean anything, he’s only a car. The boy took her home and she kissed him as expected. At night she prayed for forgiveness and imagined her sheets were a phantasmal body pressing her down, flush to every shivering inch of her. Years later, the boy will be dating someone else (a soprano, pretty) but shyly confess to her how he used to believe they would get married one day. She’ll laugh kindly, not knowing what to say. What it must be like to believe in things as small as that.