no chapter name
Mrs Lazarus opens the chapter in a torrent of grief, describing how she spent night and day weeping over the loss of her husband. She tears the wedding cloth from her breasts, howls, shrieks, claws at the burial stones until her hands bleed, and curses his name repeatedly—dead, dead. She retreats to a solitary cot, living as a widow with an empty glove and a scattered white femur in the dust. In a ritualistic frenzy she stuffs dark suits into black bags, dons a dead man’s shoes, fastens a double‑knotted tie around her bare neck, and sees herself as a gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. She studies the “Stations of Bereavement,” each bleak frame an icon of her own face. Over months his presence shrinks to a snapshot, his name losing its spell, his hair drifting out of a book, his scent vanishing from the house. The will is read; he reduces to “the small zero held by the gold of my ring,” then becomes legend, language, and memory.
Later, she stands in a field at evening, wrapped in a fine shawl, the moon rising and a hare thumping from a hedge. Village men rush toward her, followed by women, children, and barking dogs. A sly light on the blacksmith’s face, the barmaid’s sharp eyes, and sudden hands carry her into the hot tang of a crowd that parts before her. In that moment she sees her husband alive—though a horror stricken, rotting shroud clings to him. She hears his mother’s frantic song, smells his putrid stench, and recognizes him as her bridegroom, now a moist, disheveled corpse croaking his own name, disinherited and out of time.