Tag: death

The Lamp in the Room

28 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Melissa Knox

The bell-shaped white lilies, stretching upward, concealing tiny light bulbs, charmed me. With the delicacy, though not the colors, of Art Nouveau, the lamp softened the room. There was a little white plug. I wondered why it wasn’t plugged in yet.

The furniture was white and mostly square, except for a small black leather sofa near the bed. Between it and the bed, a laminated white bedside table held my husband’s toiletries bag and plastic bottles of pills. The window, which didn’t open, looked out on the white, rectangular buildings of the university hospital. Beyond that, the road filled with pitched-roof German houses, tidy, so much neater than ours. From that road, I figured, he and I could walk to our house in six minutes. But he was never going to walk that road again.

“Oh, look at this pretty lamp!” I said, as the nurse wheeled him to his bed. He cast a blankly sad look at the lamp.

My husband knew what the lamp meant before I did. It didn’t charm him, I now think, because he’d correctly identified it. Where I just saw lovely design, he, raised Catholic, had seen many a virgin-and-child scene strewn with lilies, symbols of life after death. His tumor markers had vaulted up, after a few weeks of dramatic descent. His doctors couldn’t pull any more rabbits out of hats. A few days earlier, he’d had one last immunotherapy. The doctors said it had no side effects. My husband and I sat on his white bed and read the plastic bag listing the side effects, one of which was sudden death.

“It’s just death!” we joked. We spoke of the children and their triumphs, chatted about the one who’d gone vegan for a week and now demanded steak, discussed the wet spot in the left-hand corner of our guest room and how to repair it, held hands. “I couldn’t have asked for a better wife,” said my husband. What came out of my mouth was, “Please send a message to let me know you are okay.” I wished I could have taken that one back. It fell into the whiteness of the room.

The lamp was lit when I returned around one in the morning with my middle child. The room was white, but my husband was yellowing, his lifeless face looking surprised. He’d fallen forward so quickly he knocked over the nurse who was stabilizing his breathing. Just like that, what I knew would happen astonished me when it did—and now the white seemed the blankness of unknowing, the move toward “that undiscovered realm from which no traveler returns,” which we cannot describe—it’s white. Waiting for us to draw on when we get there? Or just nothingness? The room couldn’t tell me; the lilies gleamed—the lamp plugged in, the light shining.

Melissa Knox‘s recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Counterweight, Areo, Parhelion and ACM. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com

drone shot of a bridge over a body of water — Photo by Денис Лобанов on Pexels.com

Suspension

18 November 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Michele Annable

She’s so cold that her teeth smash together, and the wind creeps up her sleeves and pant legs like little ice imps. When she looks down, she sees the pink rosettes of her slippers. It’s a winter’s day. December, she thinks.

Who dressed her this morning? It was one of those women, always pushing her: “Here, take your pills, Joan. Brush your teeth.” That’s what started it, the constant hurrying when she didn’t want to. How simple it was, after all. Just push open the big glass entrance doors and walk right through. No one yelled. No one followed.

It’s very bright in the world outside. She has to hold up her hands to her eyes. The sun hits the salt on the road, shatters into rays of light. On both sides of the street, people are dressed in puffy winter clothes, like big colourful balloons. Everyone looks happy. The trees crackle as their remaining leaves turn in the wind. She wants to keep walking forever, as long as her legs will carry her, but she knows she should get off the road somewhere, to be safe. They will come after her.

A bright red hand floating in mid-air tells her to wait, wait, wait. She sees her small self in the window of a passing car. Face all scrunched up. Her eyes meeting eyes behind the dark glass. Frightened, she crosses the street against the traffic. Cars blare their horns, and she freezes in the middle. She scuttles across the busy road, her slippers sliding, and reaches the other side. The dark park looms ahead. There, only the treetops are brushed with light.

She knows this park. Knows that on the path ahead there is a suspension bridge she has been visiting all her life. As a teenager, shrieking with excitement as her boyfriend shook the cables at one end. He made her bounce and wobble as she tried to balance in the middle. As a young woman, she came with her kids, always so anxious about them. Later, she came with her seniors’ hiking group.

Inside the park and out of breath, she sits at the base of a huge evergreen, her back against the solid trunk. The tree whispers to her. “Where to? Where to now?”

Small knots of people move past her, stare and look away. No wonder. Look at the way she is dressed! They probably think she is a…what’s the word? There’s a word. She can’t get it. It slips away into the darkness of her thoughts like an arrow.

Her mind deserts her now, and she is like the tree, breathing in, breathing out. She has a sharp pain somewhere. Is it her stomach? Or her legs? A crow toes its way across the path, looking at her with one eye and then the other. He’s big and shiny and frightening. Her heart thuds.

“What are you doing here?” he asks in a hoarse voice. Terrified, she stumbles forward onto her hands and knees, then scrambles down the stairs onto the suspension bridge. This is the only way to cross the ravine.

She starts out, heel, toe, heel, toe, hands like claws clutching the cold steel railing. The swaying begins. She can’t catch the rhythm, her steps too slow, too heavy. She grabs the mesh with her frozen hands and gasps. Down below is the river. The rocks. The rushing torrent of water. Should she let go and let herself fall over the edge? Falling through the air, one last moment in the world. Air, water, rocks, body.

Halfway across, she looks back. Then ahead. She is suspended above the cold green river. Her mouth opens to call for help, then clamps shut. They would put her back in that place and she would never get out again. She takes one small step, then another, and she is across. Tears slide down her frozen cheeks.

Under a cluster of trees, she finds a patch of leaves and needles untouched by ice or snow, like a blanket. She sits and stretches her legs. Sees that she has lost her slippers, and that her feet are now purple lumps. She digs them deep into the soft needles, pulls her jacket tighter around her, closes her swollen eyes.

Slowly and almost imperceptibly, she feels vibrations passing into her from the tree, as if it were nurturing her. Bit by bit, her body ceases to matter. She remembers the things of her life that she has forgotten for so long, recalls them fondly as if saying goodbye. Husband, kids, love, sleep, sex, skin, ocean, sand, mountains.

She lies back and gives in to the enfolding warmth.

Michele Annable is a writer and teacher living in West Vancouver. She is an emerging writer with two short stories published in Room and Prairie Journal Online.

beauty blush brush color — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Field Work

1 August 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Alison Arthur

Her eyes are close-set, small, appearing to sink into the sides of her nose. “Hmm,” thinks Lilibeth. “Problematic”. Perhaps some foundation will make her nose appear narrower. That might relieve the piggy quality of her eyes. Good big ears, though. A definite plus. And, they don’t protrude overly. Her mouth is unremarkable.

Lilibeth has a theory about the size and placement of facial features and how this relates to the intelligence of a person. The larger the facial feature, the greater the intellectual capacity. And, of course, the reverse is also true. Perhaps her big ears and small eyes cancel each other out and the net result is average ability. Of course, close-set small eyes are a particularly bad sign. Difficult to say; perhaps a bit of a dim wit.

“Are you finished?” he calls from the adjoining room.

“Just a minute. Almost,” Lilibeth puts a few more dabs of contour powder on her cheeks and expertly blends. Good enough, she concludes. Ready. She closes the casket lid in preparation for transfer to the chapel.

Once the casket is in place, Lilibeth opens the lid to reveal her handiwork. Not her best, but adequate, she decides. The first mourners are arriving now, and she discretely slides into a seat in the back row as is her habit. She always attends the services of those she has prepared. She likes to listen to the eulogy to see if it validates her conclusions. Her version of field work.

Alison Arthur is a a retired Counselling Therapist living in rural Nova Scotia. She is new to flash fiction and is excited about this new adventure in her life.

seashore under white and blue sky during sunset — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Don’t Bury Me Alone

22 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Machlis Rechtman

I don’t want to die
Alone on a bare floor
And have a stranger come upon my body
Lifeless with eyes wide open
Wondering why no one was there
To say goodbye.

And I don’t want my soul to hover
Watching those I loved wracked with grief
Saying all the things I longed to hear
When it would have meant something
But it’s too late
Like missing a plane
Or a train
Because you forgot your ticket
But instead, you forgot your words.

Don’t bury me in the cold, hard ground
Where gravediggers struggle to make headway
Their shovels slamming into earth like steel
That refuses to yield space for a wooden box

Where visitors might feel obliged to stop by once a year
To shed a few tears
And dust off a headstone
And maybe leave some flowers that will soon wither and die.

But instead, scatter my ashes by the ocean where I’m home
Where the waves lap gently at the sand
And the sun warms the soul
Where I can drink in the life that I’ve left
And no longer feel alone.

I will be there in your dreams
You’ll hear me in the wind
And maybe if you think of me
You’ll find I’m in your heart.

Nancy Machlis Rechtman has had poetry and short stories published in Paper Dragon, The Thieving Magpie, Quail Bell, Goat’s Milk, and more. She wrote freelance Lifestyle stories for a local newspaper and was the copy editor for another local paper. She currently writes a blog called Inanities at https://nancywriteon.wordpress.com.

gray and black galaxy wallpaper — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

My Eyes Are Small

29 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Walter Weinschenk

The portals of my eyes are small
But through them I see the Pleiades,
And when the atmosphere is clear
I see them staring back at me.

My ears are also small:
Narrow halls through which I heard,
One dismal afternoon,
The steady drum of Death,
His footsteps loud upon the stairs;
Steady at first, then tentative,
They slowly faded as Death retreated
For no apparent reason.

In the silence of the morning,
Some trifling sound – a chirping bird,
A broken twig, it doesn’t matter which –
Is loud enough to rouse
The mountain from his sleep;
He lets roll the snow
And it decimates a town
That took a thousand years to build.

And so it is that the enormity of love,
Too immense to understand,
Is born within the gentle press
Of pallid lips together,
And the touch of tiny fingertips
Across the boundless space
That lies between two sets of eyes.

Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. His writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including the Carolina Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words, Griffel, The Raw Art Review with work forthcoming in the Iris Literary Journal and Sand Hills Literary Magazine. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C.

atmosphere branch cold dark — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

But It Deepens

28 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Jeff Burt

Snowflakes swirled under two streetlights at the park like shooting stars against the night sky. A young woman lay prone on the cement walk. I first thought she was making angels in the snow, but with more inspection seemed more on the path to becoming an angel. She did not move. The bellows of her chest had stopped.

I felt for a pulse on her iridescent wrist, flesh a translucent paper exposing thin, visible veins from arms gone gaunt. I touched her berry-colored lips to close them, the unlit indigo of her iris like an old bruise, a plum after the sun has caressed and not yet ripened, of a lily when the color vanishes and the petals fall, the pale purple of candles of the church lit for repentance, the amethyst of meditation, the lilacs pressed in books to mark a place of interest lost in the shuffle of reading, dried lavender, as if Death had kissed her but was interrupted before all color had been taken.

Her rayon dress ran through my fingers, like mercury freed from containment and spilling on the pavement unable to be contained by the merest boundary, without bond, lake water slipping through my hands no matter how hard I tightened my fists, and I remembered my mother’s hands covered in cornstarch when I was a child, her laughter at watching the water beads form in her hands as she tried to wash them, the starch remaining in the crevices of her palms like snowflakes she said, that do not melt in the darkness underneath trees.

I called for help. Snow fell and kept on falling. I wanted the snow to fall like rain, anonymous, consistent, but each time I looked out saw chaos, swirls without pattern, each flake individually propelled. I covered the woman with my jacket.

She survived.

That night my father called. Cancer had taken my mother.

Though I am separated by years from that night, I still see the silhouettes brought by that snowfall, the variations of brilliant white, dirty white, and gray, and the stunning blackness of the park’s backdrop. I still see every variation of flake falling under the lamps, the wide, the slim, the lace-like, the cotton-like, the confetti, the crystal, the furred, the angular, and the oblique.

The snowflakes perpetuate like a background that never gets refreshed, snowflakes not feathery like eiderdown which sways back and forth like a pendulum lowering itself to earth, but drifting, white blossoms floating on the dark swells of quiet waterways, white funeral mums among black cloth, white petals of roses against the dress of dark evening, white hair of my mother with cancer drained of pigment, white doilies she treasured as gifts, the white of waves high capped and falling, white of waterfalls in spring, eidolons of snowflakes lingering in memory, eidolons that haunt me.

All images now resolve into one collage and crowd my consciousness. They become a single form flying at me on a conveyor of wind until I cannot perceive, not blinded, but that visible shape has been coalesced into a picture book fanned repeatedly with frames I cannot distinguish, surviving, dying, all one.

People tell me this will pass. But it deepens.

The mind filters and selects things we do not wish to come forward, and most often, the years have eroded memories, and they no longer hold us. Snow melts.

For me, it has never stopped snowing.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has worked in electronics, healthcare, and mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Per Contra, and Consequence Magazine.

A wind blew through

2 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Steve Gerson

Monday, September 23, Grand Chenier, LA,
hurricane season. The sky was the color of silk

coffin liners. The wind was heaving, bowing
and rising as mourners in prayer, quiet then

shrieking when wailing began. Palm leaves
outside the bedroom window startled

and calmed and woke and roiled.
I sat in the bedroom and watched the storm

unfold as bible pages turning from John’s
hearts untroubled and unafraid to Ecclesiastes’

dust returning to the ground. Fronds on the
wallpaper, once verdant, now grayed in the storm

shadows. The chandelier swayed in the house’s
torment, casting light flickers like candles snuffed.

She was still. Only her brown hair now pewter
quivered on the pillow, a stray breeze from the window,

the curtain shivering as the hurricane descended. Others
entered the room. We stood silent, our breaths held

in her breath denied. Our silence was as the hurricane’s
eye, tornadoes swirling around a dead center.

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance and dynamism. He’s proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, Montana Mouthful, the Decadent Review, Indolent, Rainbow Poems, Snapdragon, the Underwood Press, Wingless Dreamer, Gemini Ink, the Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, and more. He’s proud to have published Once Planed Straight, a chapbook of prairie poems through Spartan Press.

crop person pouring whiskey into glass — Photo by Charlotte May on Pexels.com

Time-Tested Tenets

24 February 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Foster Trecost

The handwriting was so overly scrolled, some letters looked like caricatures. I never knew funerals could be by invitation, but there’d been a death and someone wanted me at the service. I returned the card to its casing and placed a call, asked the answerer if he’d received an invite. Continuing his role, he said he had, then we swapped roles and he asked if I was going. I unsheathed the invitation, read it again, and said, “I’m not entirely sure what I’ve been asked to attend, but I’ll be first in line to find out.”

The parlor filled with seasoned socialites alongside newly assigned A-Lister’s. I claimed neither title, but a shared curiosity landed us in the same place. That, and the open bar. Occasional guests deserved closer scrutiny, but only because they had yet to master the rules of invisibility, a skill that would allow attendance at such events to be recorded only in the register. Music oozed from hidden speakers, but I only noticed when it stopped. The lights dimmed to a point just past dusk and everyone stared at the stage, empty except for two podiums. And our hosts appeared, Justin and Claire, neither deceased.

Claire thanked us for coming, then said, “You’re expecting a funeral and that’s what you’ll get. But this one’s different. Nobody died.”

Relief. Confusion. And yes, disappointment. Just a bit, but some.

“I’m here to pay final respects, not to Justin, but to the relationship I had with him.” She looked to her right.

True to his cue, Justin: “I’m here for the same reasons. Claire, the woman I hoped she’d be, but never became.”

“He was a good man.”

“She had a heart of gold.”

And that wrapped up the niceties. The volley of insults that ensued played out like a tennis match. Before long I could see Claire’s bottom lip began to quiver. Justin’s voice cracked like an adolescent. And I started piecing together what this was all about.

“He was condescending, he needed to feel smarter than everyone.”

“She didn’t like to read but wanted everyone to think she liked to read.”

And with this she left her post and crossed the stage. I imagine the acoustics made the slap sound worse than it was, but she struck him and I’m unsure who was more surprised, us or him. “I like to read,” she said. He raised a hand to cheek like he was checking for blood. Then she surprised us again by kissing him.

“But I’ve got more,” said Justin.

“So do I,” said Claire. She pointed to the rear of the room, to the bar in waiting. “The funeral is on hold, but drinks are on the house.”

A cluster of confused faces made their way to the bar. Everyone seemed to have a theory: public therapy, performance art, a happening. I had my own take. We saw two people who so desperately sought closure, they staged a funeral for their relationship, but they weren’t ready to bury it, not just yet. And we watched them begin again.

A man standing nearby asked my opinions on the proceedings, but he wouldn’t get them. Never respond to questions, a time-tested tenet of invisibility. I turned my back to him, faced the bar, and ordered an Old Fashioned.

Foster Trecost writes stories that are mostly made up. They tend to follow his attention span: sometimes short, sometimes very short. Recent work appears in Harpy Hybrid Review, Right Hand Pointing, and BigCityLit. He lives near New Orleans with his wife and dog.

Maybe Death Smells Like Onions

20 February 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Pamela McCarthy

Presentation is important. Set the table with good dishware, with the silver placed just so, with the napkins folded. Maybe light a candle or two.

Who am I talking to? I guess I’m talking to you, ghosts.

Make something that won’t tax your resources and that will be delicious. What I mean is, use what you have on hand. Cut things evenly, add salt—always add some salt—add the spices and flavorings you want. Maybe cook with a little of the wine you were going to drink in the hopes it would lead you to where everyone is, where you can at least visit with them for a while.

This is why it’s important to buy the ingredients before things go to shit. Before you can’t get to the Indian grocery store and can’t get your hands on asafoetida. Well, I got the asafoetida a while ago, it’s been in my cupboard. Its stench is legendary, like death according to one vlogger, so when I sniffed it, I was disappointed. It smelled like onions to me. It still does. Old onions, I suppose, but …onions.

Where was I?

Make something that can accommodate the remaining chicken in your freezer. Something that will tie the past and present together. Something you would proudly serve to your family or friends, if they were here to eat it.

We won’t think about that.

Pour yourself a glass of wine while the chicken roasts in the marinade you prepared. The power could go out any minute. Pour yourself another glass of wine when it goes out just after you take it out of the oven. Toast the grid. The grid is dead, long live the grid.

After raising your glass, remember why you’re doing this. Why am I doing this? Well, we all do things like this for a reason, I’m sure you have your own. Maybe it’s to remember eating with your loved ones.

Look at the photographs of your family, your friends, the ones who can’t be here because there’s no safe passage any longer, the ones who can be here because they are ghosts. Remember that you have to eat what you’ve prepared. You are on your third glass of wine, you lush! Haha, I am hammered. Alone. Drinking alone was never on my bucket list, and it wasn’t anything I did before all…all this.

The chicken is good with the asafoetida. Resolve to use more of it in your cooking, then realize that the grid is sputtering in its death throes like everything else. You’re in a condo, one that’s been awfully quiet. Did everyone die? Wouldn’t there be a smell? Would it smell like the asafoetida?

I know I’m drunk. Here I am, giving instructions and advice on cooking to ghosts. If you pay attention, you can see them from the corner of your eye in the shadows thrown by the candles you lit for ambiance, but which are now for light.

Pamela McCarthy spends her days working in healthcare fundraising and her nights writing short fiction. When she is not working or writing, she is buying seeds for her garden, creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds, or reading.