YAWP: A Collection of Short Stories

Death and Me

August 28, 2017

You have it wrong, you know. Death doesn't start when the light blinks out of someone's eyes. It isn't when the heart stops or when your hear the last, rattling echo in their chest. Death isn't that cold whisper in your ear or that cold water trickling down to the small of your back. It isn't like they'd said it'd be. Death was cold, and silent. My throat constricted. My teeth ground together, my throat scraped raw from screaming. My eyes opened to a pit of black nothing. It was despair and fear and nothing all at once. There wasn't some person waiting to bring me home. I didn't have a hand for an angel to grasp onto. I didn't have a heart to feel beating. What had previously been my mind was a lump of charcoal in a plate of ashes. I can't explain how long the blackness lasted. I wasn't myself anymore.

My consciousness was the fragmented sentences of an unfinished poem, my mind fit together like shards of broken glass. This wasn't philosophy. This wasn't science. This was my body rotting in the ground. It felt like only a moment before I could picture my body lying on a slab, my glazed eyes useless orbs that stared into nullity. I could recall the immediate process after death. They said that the instant your heart stopped pounding in that irregular pattern in dying that your cells and tissues stop receiving oxygen. Brain cells go first. Then the bones. You begin to rot from the inside out. The blood drains, it pools at the bottom of your corpse. That's why they they say you're as pale as death. Then your muscles begin to stiffen, and you'll feel cold, but not cold enough to make you worried.

I heard something once about decay from a friend. He was a mortician, and I don't think he realized the bitter irony in the fact that the person he was speaking to would be another body he would have to cut open. He said, "Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these will also vanish with death." I am a body in the ground. I am the maggots that feast on flesh under soil. I can't feel my body, but I can remember. I know what happens when you're six feet under. They'll mourn for a while. And then they'll forget. I'll be here and they'll be up there and nothing changes. Time doesn't exist here, all there is is death, and me. I'll stay for as long as my body is here. My memories will fade over time until my mind is ash and dust and the musty corners of the basement where people leave the forgotten things. I will be recycled into the earth, my body disappearing with barely a mark, as if I had never been and never will be.

But then maybe a flower will grow there.