Sherri Alms: WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DEATH • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Sherri Alms
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DEATH

A body begins to decompose four minutes after a person leaves it.

I was born on my father’s birthday. A week or so before his sixty-third birthday and my forty-second, he told me he had cancer. Inoperable. Untreatable.

It can take up to ten years for a body to decompose completely.

Dust twinkling in front of the windows could be a message from someone I loved or just what’s left of the thousands of stinkbugs who died in our house.

When we were little, Dad invented an invisible friend, Ralph. Ralph knocked on the door when we were eating dinner. He had nonsensical conversations with Dad. We laughed until we hiccupped.

Resurrection begins before we die, as our cells die and new ones take their place. We lose 500 million skin cells every day, replaced by new ones.

A Buddhist composition enumerates seven stages of death, beginning with the body dead for a couple of days, “swollen, blue, and festering,” and ending with only bones, “white in color like a conch.” It comforts me, this movement from grisly mess to the holiness of hard white bone.

Dad’s last breath caught me unaware. His chest went flat, his body lost that third dimension that made him alive. His life a paper doll cartwheeling up to the ceiling, slipping through the roof, into the tree branches, then toward the early spring stars.

A body is delicious to the creatures that clean it up for us. Return the bones to dirt.

When Calvin, our fifteen-year-old cat died, we put his body in the garage so my husband could dig a grave in our garden. I stroked his fur, like rosary beads sliding along my fingers, praying for a potion to wash me clean of future grief.

Dad’s face in his coffin is a smooth flesh-colored pond, the crag of his nose an island. He was not a smooth person, by turns cranky and raucous, a drinker. Someone who often said I love you. There was no history in this face.

We hide bodies deep in the ground to dissolve into loamy soil. Grief does not dissolve, a knot in our bodies so real we want to rub where it is, nut-sized or as big as a grapefruit.

Dad and I browsed a bookstore one evening when I was in high school. I saw a book of Shakespeare’s plays. When I said I would love to have it, he bought it, the only gift he personally got for me. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, unabridged, illustrated, is still on my book shelf, paper cover with small tears along the wrinkled edges, pages browning and smelling of old book.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3.

What if dead friends, parents, siblings, children could float until they disappeared into the sky, and we stood waving goodbye from the ground? Bright clothes belling and catching the wind.

Dad and I argued so much about politics, he often told me I should be a lawyer. They get paid for arguing, he would say. It was a ball of love he tossed in my direction. I never let it go.

In the Book of Ezekiel, the bones of a dead army knit themselves back together into bodies as Ezekiel commanded them to. Purl one, knit two, tendons, muscles dancing into their proper places cleaving one unto another unto another.

Would I love someone who came back to life? Or would they make me afraid to sleep in the same house?

Calvin’s brother, Hobbes, died four years later. We laid him in the bed he loved, its boa-like border of white, pink, and red threads throwing a little party around the edge, and buried him next to Calvin. A few weeks later, pale purple irises bloomed there.

The dead speak. In dust of their bones. In dreams. Down the street, my name on their invisible lips.

Dad asked my forgiveness before he died, for not being a better father, for the mistakes he made. The sun flowed gold above the lake beyond his backyard, washing us both in sunset.

Sherri Alms writes weird, sweet, and occasionally angry stories, poems, and essays. Her work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Rattle, Cosmic Daffodil, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and other publications. She is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and two cats in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.