Everyone's Closet Rattled That Day

“Everyone’s Closet Rattled That Day”

When Dwight died,
the light came on.
And suddenly I was the monster,
standing naked beside my bones.

They said, ““look at her,
look at what she did.”
As if grief had an audience
and everyone came dressed in clean skin.

But I know better.
I’ve heard the whispers
through thin walls and glass houses.

Josh — with his halo crooked —
made fake profiles at midnight,
searching for women who looked nothing like his wife.
He preached family values
between browser tabs.

Sarah — the Sunday volunteer —
sends money to a man she’s never met,
calls it “helping the less fortunate,”
but it’s really her loneliness on a wire.

And Mark — the one who told me I ruined Dwight —
can’t look his son in the eye
because he sees too much of himself in the boy’s rage.

Then there’s quiet Denise,
who smiles through funerals
like she’s collecting ghosts.
They say her husband drowned by accident,
but no one asks why she still keeps his wedding ring
locked in her car’s glove box —
next to the rope.

Pastor Jim prays for sinners,
but he keeps a bottle of chloroform
under his pulpit,
says it’s “for cleansing,”
and sometimes the choir girls
come out of his office crying,
smelling like peppermint and fear.

And sweet old Marianne,
the neighborhood mother hen —
feeds stray cats,
and once, they say, a runaway girl
who never made it home.
No one ever found the body,
but the lilacs in her garden
never stop blooming.

We all have something dead
humming in the dark.
Mine just got dragged out,
bleached by the headlines,
picked apart by hands that have their own blood
they pretend not to see.

So when you tell me
I should’ve done better,
I think —
at least my ghosts have names.
At least my bones are honest enough
to rattle out loud.

And when they sleep,
I hope they dream of Dwight —
not as a curse,
but as a shadow moving through their houses,
soft-footed and relentless,
the sound of a man who couldn’t lie anymore.
He won’t scream,
won’t strike,
he’ll just linger —
like guilt in the corners,
like a mirror you avoid in the dark.

Because if my truth burned in public,
then theirs will smolder in private.
No one buries guilt forever.
It just waits, patient,
for the next gunshot,
the next headline,
the next fool brave enough
to turn on the light.

Chloe