Before they were dead, they pasted witty slogans to the rear bumpers of their vehicles, slogans that were as much other-challenging as self-expressing. Mostly, these slogans were concerned with how other people should spend their money.
Each morning, before they were dead, they snapped out great sheets of ink-dirty paper filled with negativity. Many took it to heart, so much so that they hurled their own negativity at the sheaves, going so far as to carry on about the subjects in said papers, long afterward, with other folks yet-undead. If the negativity seemed particularly important, they would enter into an informed but calculated duel involving opposing ideologies and piles of statistics. Statistics, they believed, were absolute truths that varied from year to year.
Oftentimes, they would hide from one another in the grocery store. Once in a blue moon, this was because of a murder or a house burning, but usually it was over a word poorly chosen from the dictionary or their many words, or a phone call left unreturned, or a chip bowl dropped and broken but not replaced.
They made love, they married, they gave birth to tabula rosai, whom they both loved and hated because of the uncanny resemblance to themselves, whom they both loved and hated.
They worked extra hard so that they might retire early, and then they died of heart failure — from plaque or loneliness – before taking that long awaited sail around the world. They spent whole lifetimes building snowmen, and then when their boat finally did arrive, they were too terrified to sail it. Terrified and utterly exhausted.
Before they were dead, they were like molecules of all different chemical make-ups, moving always against and away.
Then they were dead.
They waited in the auditorium counting their soul-fingers and soul-toes, nothing to debate, no entertainment news to discuss. And finally, across the hall a tiny porthole opened like the aperture of an old-timey camera, letting in a sphere of light. They followed it as it entered and grew, this essence the single focus of their attention. It filled the space between their soul bodies, filled them, and, together again as they had always been even if they'd forgotten it for so long, they stepped out into the light.
When I was smoking crack — I'll let you digest and comprehend this seemingly incongruent piece of my history — I didn't care about a whole lot. Then I beat it, beat drink too at the same time, and then finally beat nicotine, which everyone agreed was killing me and annoying them. And then this morning, the sweet faced, omniscient nurse delivered my doctor's advice that if I wanted the pain to stop I would have to quit coffee, and I felt that old rebellious carelessness rise up to my rescue, because that, my friends, is a sacrifice I will not make.
Steven Miller's fiction has appeared in various online journals, Cavalier Literary Couture and elimae, to name a few.
ISSUE:
F A L L
2012
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