Forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia
Mother’s Death
When my mother dies, her disciples will bury her in a kind of cavey tomb. Two or three days later, one of the Marys (but which one?) will pass by, and hey, no one’s inside. She will run to fetch the other disciple whom my mother loved even more than me, and when he gets to the tomb, he won’t go in, but peering into the darkness, he’ll make out the tea towels they wrapped mother’s corpse in (what all you heretics call dish cloths). He’ll poke his head in a bit further and the sour stench of that bottle of Christian Dior perfume my mother refused to throw away will waft out of the tomb. The bottle had a little black and white checker pattern running round the center of the glass. Later on, after the disciples go to their homes, I’ll bump into the apparition who claims to be my mother. I hear you doubt that I’m alive. Why don’t you peer into my darkness? She’ll stick my finger in the gooey hole in her side, red like the bubbling raspberry jam in her famous jam slice, and out will flow the stink of Miss Dior, or was it Eau Sauvage?—but as for mother’s ongoingness: no way, I will not believe her.
Father’s Death
When my father dies, he will be shipped to a location that is yet to be disclosed. As soon as I am notified, I will take the first plane out of LA to one of two sites: cemetery A on continent X, or cemetery B on continent Y. Upon arriving, I will be tired, the jetlag of death. I will jump into a cab and ask the mysterious cab driver to step on the gas. It will be night, of course, so the gates to the cemetery will be locked and I will need to jump over the metal fence. The cab driver will give me a leg up and leap over himself. With the help of the handsome cabbie and the promise of a generous tip, we will exhume the coffin. You see, my father liked to walk and play golf, he won’t like being in an enclosed space. When we open the lid, my father will seem very tired, the dead are all jetlagged. His skeleton will be reticent, though not as reticent as he was. If it is not practical to return to Los Angeles with his corpse, I will search his pockets, tell me your secrets father, there must be something else I can steal.
My Death
When I die, my memory—or do I mean your memory of me?—will dissolve like the Platonic (abstract) form of a cube of sugar in a cup of tea, like the post-abstract expressionist (Neoplatonic) form of the corpse of a boy in a hot pink ceramic tub of hydrochloric acid, correction: sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye, but don’t be alarmed my lover mein Leser mon lecteur: your memory—or do I mean my memory of you?—will dissolve with me.
Drowning
After I finished crying I was hot so I took off my coat. I noticed my tears had left a circuitous pattern on one of the sleeves, like a line of salt left by the tide. I thought about drowning myself, and tried to decide which body of water would be most suitable: a lake, a river, or the sea? The sea felt too complex, what with its waves and tidal systems. A river seemed too winding. I settled upon a lake; that way my corpse could look up at the red bottoms of toy sailboats. I imagined my coat slowly loosening itself from my body, floating up to the water’s surface, a child finding the coat and poking it with a stick.
Electric Chairs
My mother’s electric chair is covered in green fabric, with a motif of pink and yellow roses. It has nice thick straps on both arms, refashioned from old belts belonging to my father. The chair sits by the big window in the lounge room, what you call a living room, but where I come from, we don’t live. The sun is fading the fabric’s colors—the chair is long overdue for a reupholstering. We keep it unplugged, to save on electricity, and to avoid fires. Sometimes, when everyone is out, I plug in the cord and strap myself in and listen to my nerves sizzle like bacon.
Knives, Part Three
Knives are lovely, no one will disagree, not the sculptor or the cutler or the boy scout or the murderer or the grinder or the sailor or the surgeon or the material maker, not the dripping red meat, not the soft substance, but knives were even lovelier before they were knives, during that brief period when they were just lengths of steel, giving off a bright red glow.
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Alistair McCartney is the author of the cross-genre novels The Disintegrations (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), which won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, and The End of The World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. Other work has appeared in journals such as 3:AM Magazine, Fence, Animal Shelter, 1913: A Journal of Forms, FIVE:2:ONE, X–R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and SCAB. Originally from Australia, he lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches fiction in Antioch University’s MFA program and directs the undergraduate creative writing concentration.