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Death lives in glamor with his cemeteries of dolled-up corpses, glazed wooden coffins crafted with love, and his endless treasure trove once gifts for the dead—now his to enjoy. A strange mortal practice to think the dead need worldly possessions when death will be drinking from shining chalices and aged wine left for the deceased. He cannot desecrate the dead when they belong to him.
But you are familiar with it. you have lived through his company while surrounded by faces because you are mortal, and there is nothing more fragile than human strength. You swear you are mortal, and it is the mortal thing to hold a procession and pay respects to the dead.
You sit perched on the edge of an empty grave, a pocket of abyss in an abyss. Your toes dig into the dirt, feeling the void call for you. You wonder if all that awaits in the afterlife is black on black. You and your body are well acquainted with it now, from one anatomy lesson after another. The ivory hilt of the knife satisfyingly smooth to the touch as you poise it with clinical ease towards your body. The way you can plunge it in your stomach, your heart, the throat, the sharpness of metal fading as fast as your consciousness. Sometimes, the prominently blue artery on your arm will do the trick, and it’s all the more satisfying when it bursts and sprays rather than drips, drips, drips, but you have yet to master such precision.
Where will you strike this time? Will they write a bible for each of your resurrection? You know what the bottom of the winding stairs look like, and so you will survive the finality of death too, as you have done before. But the knife is nowhere to be found, at least for today. This funeral is not yours. You will have your own time to test your theory.
It is rows and rows of crosses all around, a church bell ringing somewhere like a prayer muffled in whispers. The gaping grave rests below a looming tree swaying gently to the sides. You feel vines draped on your bare shoulders and soft breathing audible in the dead air.
There is you and there is Sunny, splinters covering his fingers and metal threads paralyzed with him. Oh, you had warned him to be careful with the violin. He has not played it in years and he was bound to hurt himself. Well now, it will hurt no longer.
But it would not be a funeral without flowers. You can’t imagine that the lily atop the cross is befitting the occasion, roots criss-crossing and pulsing alive and in red growing in between the stone material’s cracks. Luckily, you feel that the flowers you’ve found throughout your journey of the black space will pay better homage. Flowers for a sunflower.
You pluck your flowers gently from the pile, scented already like maggots and pus—
A body crudely slashed at the top, the head itself afloat somewhere along a river of a cavern long gone,
A body beloved by spiders to a carnivorous degree, flesh bulging red from bite after bite,
One not quite a carcass anymore, not when it’s been reduced to pulps and masses of red beyond recognition,
A head without its body now, its expression in a permanent state of desperation even in death,
The last of a boy with his body largely still intact, yet painted in a multitude of harsh colors—green, purpleish, splatters in red, a masterpiece of battering by our friends;
You sit perched on the edge of a bottomless grave. one by One, you pick from the pile of your bouquet and watch the flowers drop into nothingness.
From the dirt, you lift Sunny in your arms. You’re more careful this time, even when the body is limp and heavy. your fingers ghost over his cheek. You caress his bedhead, combing away the dirt. You try to fix the unnatural angle to his right arm and worry if you had been too harsh on him—
Not a twitch, not a peep. you feel relief and let your shoulders sag, the weight of burdens lifted. It is time to leave him be. Finally, you will turn the lights off and let him sleep.
You bring Sunny down.
The vines remain tangled to your body. They’re a bit more persistent now. You feel the lightest sensation of being tugged back, but there is nothing to fear. You are this graveyard’s keeper, and you have lived through cemeteries and mourning.
Above you, you hear the sounds of soft breathing grow frantic in the dead air.