When the Dead Speak

They say humans taste like game meat, but he tasted like grief.

Most people have multiple outstanding emotions. Happiness and ignorance. Love and trust. Fear and hopelessness. In him, it was Grief and Anger; an aftertaste familiar in its symbiotic dance. It's not grief for a family member, or a friend. But grief for a life unlived. Anger at god, their mother, their doctor or themselves, because they were the ones who forgot to live the life they were now losing.

People say when they die they want to be at peace. But I don't know what that tastes like, so I assume it is a lie. I taste a liar's tongue often, too.

The brain hosts these emotions, yet that's not what I eat. Too chewy, too complicated and personal. No, the heart, with its quickening pace and stuttering beat unveils the full spectrum of its passionate capacity with just one bite. It gives me raw emotion without ties to something more.

This brain was ruined, anyway. Most of the time, the manner in which the body died is of no importance to me. Often, it's an internal disease; ailments that rarely leave a mark, so the dead do not look unlike themselves as they lived. That's a modern change. Before, everyone was dirty and in death, their bodies skeletal and broken. People lived short lives and when confronted with their own mortality, it could not be hidden with funeral makeup inside ornate caskets.

Death waved bodies like its own flag and with its battle cry, thousands would fall. There was no hiding it, a body was plagued with buboes, littered with bullet wounds or skewered with a blade. That sort of dying still occurred today, I reminded myself, despite newfound ability to turn a blind eye.

This man was like the people before it, only in that way. I had already cleaned the back of the head and the exit wound. I had done what I could to piece the skull back together like a broken jigsaw, but still pieces of the brain spilled; as easily as water in a tipped over glass.

When I was young, when man was still killing his own food and lighting his own fires, I was taught you could always tell the age of a tree by the rings inside its trunk. Of course, the only way to see that is by cutting it down. People are similar. The dead speak languages far beyond anything capable of the living. Over time, I have become fluent.

The rings inside this man depict its 55 years. Its life was the longest thing that it would ever know, but it was so, so short. It was wasteful to see that in all that time, the most prominent emotion it could ever fathom was the grief to mark its ending.

Often, I get children here. Despite the fact they have a lot more life to grieve and less to have felt something more, rarely are they the same.

Its eyes were open and staring at the ceiling above it. I couldn't say they were brown, blue or green, in fact, the colour had leached from its iris almost entirely. Its eyes were an empty vessel; as much as a carcass to all it had seen, then its body was to what it had lived. I feel my hand, smooth and lineless, despite all its years, fall over the cold, wrinkled face and bring its eyelids down. Without the spirit of the dead man in front of me, bearing witness to his own judgement, I continued with my workings.

"Mama, can I come in yet?" Two nervous knocks sound against the clean, white door.

The chrome handle wavers anyway, despite my protests. My daughter, Ettiyer, warily walks inside, one meek step after another.

I sigh, but let her stand against the walls and watch. She knows what I do and what conclusion I must come to, but not why I do it. I know I have to teach her soon, but to steal from her the liberty of ignorance is not something I will readily do. This is what our life is intrinsically tied to, for better or for worse.