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Tag: death
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Appeal – flash fiction by Dan DeMarco
Avoid asking questions that begin with why. These questions sound like, Why did you have to die? Why did you have to die like this? Why did you have to die before me? You aren’t really looking for an answer when you ask this kind of question. You’re looking for an assurance that your wife’s death was not simply a cruel accident, that these things are maintained by a higher order, that the death of your wife was a necessary part of some incomprehensible divine plan. You must completely expel these thoughts from your mind if you are to have any success in your encounter with your dead wife. Since she entered the afterlife your wife is no doubt in some sort of metaphysical state, transcending the limitations of the physical, and so from this vantage point it is likely that she can see well into your past and understand every thought and feeling you experienced toward her while she was alive: every white lie you ever told her, every girl you may have fantasized about replacing her with, every time you secretly wished she was dead. Do not dwell on the fact that she knows all of these things. You will only have time to ask your wife a single question. Depending on how fast you’re able to transcribe her messages, her reply could go on for several seconds. And so with this extremely reduced time window to work with, you would be well advised not to entertain open-ended cosmic notions, such as the possibility that your wife was taken from you as some sort of divine punishment. Everything has been cast in a different light now; small, formerly inconsequential memories have taken on a new, horrible significance—like the time all the way back in high school, when you told your friend you would sell your soul just to get a girlfriend, and you met her the week after. Like the night you and she first made love, the sticky summer air floating in through the screen in her open window, enveloping your bodies on the floor as she moved on top of you, whispering “Damn you, damn you, damn you” in your ear. All of this is to say, you must, under no circumstances, have your predestined place in the afterlife become a topic of this otherworldly interrogation. If it is revealed that you two are destined to remain eternally apart from one another, you would most likely lose emotional grip. Likewise, if you greet the ghost of your dead wife with silence or uncertainty, you risk undermining everything. Your wife may answer your silence with silence of her own, and by the time you manage to splutter out a greeting, or a half-hearted question, she will have already faded back into the ether. Or, your wife may commandeer the silence to ask questions of her own. She may choose to interrogate you about the fantasies of infidelity you entertained that she can now see quite clearly. She may ask you why you shied away from the thought of having a child with her. She would ask you these questions, even though she already knew the answers, to see what you would say. But it would still be preferable to be asked this way than to be asked a question that begins with why. These questions sound like, Why don’t you pray for me anymore, like you used to? Why did you take down that framed picture in the living room, of us smiling and holding each other under what used to be our tree in the park? Why do you avoid bringing me up in conversation, or even bringing up things related to me, like that movie that I always quoted, or the song that I would sing every morning? Why are you trying to forget me? You are already quite drunk and the letters on the board you bought from the mall are swimming in front of you. There is a possibility that nothing will happen at all. There is a possibility that your wife just doesn’t exist anymore, anywhere. When you are left alone, sitting on the floor in front of the toy-store Ouija board, drunk and red-eyed, plastic planchette unmoving in your hands, there’s no telling what you might do. You’re so old now. Take a deep breath. Think of her. This is your window. Ask.
Dan DeMarco‘s work has previously been published in Hobart Literary Journal. Find him on Twitter @itsdandemarco.
Image courtesy of Teddy Kelley via unsplash.
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Delilah’s Skull – Flash Fiction by Nan Wigington
When my dad died, I wanted to sell everything, but my brothers said no, take something, so I took Delilah’s Skull.
My dad kept cabinets. Mostly at the hospital. Patient parts, he said. For research. Some cabinets contained bones – the odd compressed spine, tibias, broken ulnas. He had organs, too, slices of cirrhotic livers, a cadre of cancerous lungs, eyes in jars of viscous liquid. They rolled upward when you shook them. The only part he didn’t keep locked away was Delilah’s skull. That stayed at the corner of his desk at home.
It was hardly a skull, though. No attached mandible, occipital. Just the hard cap of parietal and frontal bone. I used to like to run my finger along the coronal suture.
Until he stopped smoking, my dad used Delilah as an ashtray. Butterscotch candies lived there for awhile, too. But I remember it best empty. When you could see the trace of blood vessels. They ran down the yellow sides, dried tributaries of ancient rivers.
Delilah was my dad’s cadaver. He grew up in this profession when bodies were easy. No one donated, so you just took. Still the act of taking unhinges most of us a little. Even my dad.
My dad used to pretend he went a little crazy because of the formaldehyde and phenol, but he admitted later that it was the act of unzipping the bag and seeing her face – its walnut gleam, its perfect symmetry – half-lidded eyes, a crown of red hair.
Like all of us, he tried to justify his act, looked for proof of her bad life…tattoos, needle marks, wounds. But, over and over again, the only violence he could find were the strikes of his own scalpel. And his thievery. The hunger of it. Taking the heart and lungs first. Then the ovaries. My dad said his partner tore into her abdomen, cracked her pelvis like a hungry drunk, and ripped her perineum.
My dad hated most when he cut her throat, removed the larynx. Gone the curtain of speech and song. He said he touched the ossicles of her middle ear and whispered, “Sorry, sorry.”
What happened when they cut into Delilah’s skull? How many coils and folds did they find in her brain? What decisions and indecisions, what forgetting, what remembering? My dad said that back then, they were in the habit of throwing all that away.
I am my father’s daughter. I save what I have not destroyed. Delilah’s skull remains in plain sight on my desk at the hospital. Sometimes a patient picks her up and holds her in the palm of a hand.
Once a nurse put condoms in Delilah. Another time someone dumped in chocolate hearts. As if she were a stain to be covered. Both offerings were cast out. No one understands. Nothing can appease the long dead.
Nan Wigington‘s work has appeared in Gravel, The Airgonaut, Sicklitmagazine.com, and No Extra Words. She has worked as an unclaimed property clerk, an accounting analyst, an ensemble actress, and a paraprofessional in an K-2 Autism center classroom.
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Sometimes We Choose What We Remember
Flash Fiction by Luke Allis
The old cliché that time heals all wounds is simply complete bullshit. Time dulls the shock, but when you have a hurt that runs deep enough you always feel the sting. I thought this as I stood in front of your coffin, staring at your lifeless face. Your skin looked so fake, like a bad wax figure that had been stored in a garage in Arizona. The inch-thick layer of makeup that was supposed to make you look more masculine was funny in a morbid kind of way. The dead never look like themselves. Death takes the very essence of the person, even the body. You looked like a stranger. The difference in you would not have been so stark if they had not put you a suit and tie and given you a crew cut—you looked all wrong. They put you in that itchy suit you hated, the black one that you were forced to wear to your high school graduation. Your tie was the standard diagonal red and sliver stripes. I was there to mourn my sister, not the brother our parents insisted that I have. I pictured you in your favorite dress: blue with small white daisies littered all over the cotton fabric. I wish I could have given you the funeral you desired, the funeral you deserved.
Your funeral was nothing that you would have wanted. It was in a Catholic Church. I stood and knelt more times than I can remember, and lip-synched the prayers that I never memorized. They called you “he” and “James” instead of she or Lily. It felt all wrong. There were a lot of tears, but little crying out. Everyone was grief stricken; almost no one was able to talk. Those that did speak, talked about you as the brother and son you haven’t been in a long time. Each wrong pronoun brought me to an electric anger. You know me, I never talk in front of others unless I absolutely have to. But at your funeral, I knew that I was the only one that would stick up for you and remember you as you meant and deserved to be remembered. I made sure to address you as: she, Lily, and my sister in front of everyone. After that no one else got up to speak. Our mother yelled at me afterward: “I can’t believe you ruined your brother’s funeral by bringing up his sickness. We should remember him as he should have been not as he was.”
You’d never believe what I told her if you were there: “Fuck you Mom, that is exactly why SHE is dead now. You and your fucking hatred and denial did this to her.” Then I walked away. I haven’t spoken to any of our family since.
I wish your funeral had felt more intimate, more like a celebration of your life—like those old Irish wakes Grandpa would go on and on about. Where you partied, laughed, and told stories of the person’s life; where the only crying was from too much laughter. I am determined to remember you this way.
Luke Allis holds a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State. He is currently an Instructional Designer, aspiring writer, and MFA candidate at San Jose State University.