Kat Meads
Short Fiction
The body breaks down.
But for a while it doesn’t, the false reprieve.
Consider the resiliency of feet, supporting skeleton, organs, muscles, blood, upholding a tremendous load, absorbing the stress and impact of both stillness and speed, fulfilling an evolutionary task in an unnoticed, unheralded way. Taken-for-granted feet endorse the notion, contribute to the presumption—reason and science, aside—that we, the footed, will continue to rise, stand, walk, run.
Time as registered by mirrors. The intense, complicated dynamic of women and mirrors. For courage: Mary Oliver taking the stage in Provincetown in yesterday’s clothes; Gertrude Stein’s bulk; Jane Goodall’s gray, unstyled hair. Serious women privileging intellect over appearance, intellect engined by brains that will also, eventually, falter, suspend operations, misplace memories.
Memories yet in place.
A house in the 27973 zip code, built in 1942 with timber from the surrounding woods. Within its walls, three deaths and one birth in January’s chill, midwife attending. The oldest death was the death of an old man, a grandfather, dumbfounded by his longevity. The man who next died in the house wasn’t old, though he wasn’t young. While waiting for his morning pancakes, he felt a touch of heartburn. The infarction flipped him and his chair backward onto the floor where both stayed as his nightgowned wife ran across a wet field for help. The brother did try to help.
Laboring to breathe life into a corpse is a memory anyone would wish to misplace.
The house’s third death was prolonged. Oxygen tanks, hospital beds, hospice, morphine. During the day there were caregivers but at night it was only the daughter and son, sleeping in shifts. Because there was a barrel of pecans that needed cracking, the daughter sat in the kitchen where her father had died twenty-three years before, watching the clock and cracking nuts. After three hours she woke her brother. They did the same and same again. When the professional caretaker arrived in the morning, she led them to their mother’s bedside, pointing to the morphine pooled between shoulder bone and clavicle. Throughout the night, they were supposed to get morphine down the throat of the dying but they had failed.
They had tried, but they had failed.
Do buyers of old houses speculate on the number of bodies removed lifeless from the premises? Does everyone everywhere continuously imagine once-alive bodies not?
Insomnia imagines, predicts.
One has seen this, this and this happen to family, friends, pets. What are the odds that any primate or primate companion will expire without misery, pain, madness. What the day brain denies, the night brain trumpets. But whether it is preferable to die at night or noon no one alive can definitively answer.
Lessons to learn during the process of cellular corruption. Perhaps that one should cultivate more friends. A person or persons who will step in to clear out a house, wipe the computers, alert the utility company, take on the task of sorting. The strangers at Goodwill will not know or care about provenance or that the pitcher has traveled many a mile, south to north, east to west, west to farther west. As a ghost, does one check on scattered possessions or take a pass? No one not dead can answer that question definitively.
When thinking felt less an athletic feat, when paragraphs less often derailed, when hidden words more swiftly exposed themselves, she wrote this:
What a coy bastard fall had been. A few damp mornings, crusty with frost. The occasional sprinkle of rain. No thunder-scored, lightning-lit storms blown in over the ridge; milquetoast temperatures, day and night. A model, mild prelude that gave no inkling to the sadistic brutality of the season ahead.
She now writes this:
How to prepare for the sadistic brutality of the season ahead.
Need it be with grace?
Kat Meads is the author of three essay collections, most recently These Particular Women. She lives in California.
Photo Credit: Mattingly Gleason is a visual artist and poet from Eugene, Oregon, and is as rare to find in the wild as Bigfoot herself.
L'Esprit Literary Review 