Eirene Gentle
Independence day
Phyllis was 52 when she became a mushroom. It was a sensible decision, even her kids approved. They held her hand, bleached and withered from decades of exposure when she informed them. She was hard to see through the glare but her voice was firm and anyway Phyllis was more halo than mom since they were teenagers. A kind of visual psychotropic, or headlights of an oncoming truck if you’re churlish. She piled on clothes and makeup, doused herself in vats of ice but still beamed like a solar flare. She couldn’t contain it.
At 42 her sweat glands dried. Phyllis smelled like roast pork as she convected and passed out if no one hosed her down. The kids wore protective suits against the splatter.
Her tear ducts dried at 46. Unable to cry, Phyllis let out a kind of hiccup at her mother’s funeral and saved cremation costs by draping over the casket in the backlot of the funeral home, hic-moaning ‘mom’ until the everything was ash.
Ordinary people spend 3 years of their lives just blinking but there was no point in that for Phyllis so she saw everything. Flickers of deceit, the tiny tells of worst selves exposed daily in thousands of unblinking nanoseconds. She was like a psychological x-ray at the office, so uncomfortable they asked her to work from home. Then she was fired. There wasn’t much to pack up from her desk. She dumped it all in the trash just past the revolving door.
She made dry sounds like ceiling mice when she walked.
She stopped crossing her legs in case of fire.
Coincidentally her husband, Darren had been a cloud for a decade. Frequently stormy but cirrus when she needed him, he rumbled when hungry, puffed like soft serve when happy and only rained when he was out. Anyway, he was useless.
The family struggled. Darren was too changeable for regular work and no one was hiring a nimbus. Even her emails had a disquieting glow. Phyllis earned what she could through black-market cremations, happy to ease the burden of cash-strapped families but most of her dead got that way through extralegal means. Clients drove her to dubious locations in white or black vans where she smelled blood or solvents but they paid well and were usually polite. She liked that they didn’t ask questions. They liked that she was thorough and smelled deliciously of spareribs.
The job brought her to a lot of scenic places. Rivers, lakes, snowy mountains and especially woods. She loved the darkness of forest. Whispering canopy, sheltered from the broiling sun and moon. She dug her charred toes into cool earth, ran blistered fingers through pine needle carpets. Surprisingly soft. But mushrooms were the most comforting of all. So tenderly luminescent she hiccupped. Acres of cottony mycelium far from cruel sun.
Her farewell party was thrown on fireworks night so no one questioned the few extra flares. Phyllis got drunk and danced until morning. Goodbye to all this, she thought and dreamed of clammy soil with wide-open eyes.
A few of her regulars picked her up at dusk. Five vans slow-driving in a row, a thoughtful tribute. Her kids waved from their door while Darren rained over the lake.
It was a somber affair but not maudlin. Her clients wore black and called her ‘the best cremator we ever had,’ with an emotion that would’ve burst her tear glands if she had any. She settled on springy emerald moss by a chirruping creek. Everything peppery, damp and growing.
We’re the only things that burn
My timer, set for 1 minute and 31 seconds, begins counting down at exactly 1:31 pm.
A brief moment of serendipity. What to do with such a chance?
~
My brother had a firefly that danced on a pin. I don’t know where he found it. He pulled me from my bed to show me, down the small hall to the left, three normal steps for him, giant ones for me. His lamp splashed like chocolate coins in gold crinkly paper that disappeared when he flicked it off. My feet itched from cold. I was about to whine when something tiny bounced on his little wood desk.
‘So pretty!’
‘Don’t scare it!’
He held back my hair to stop it swooshing down on the firefly dancing teeny and green on the edge of a safety pin.
~
We’re born now, in this era of decline. Everyone feels it. We attack each other with nails and teeth in our cages. Any weapons we find. After killing everything around us, it’s natural we’d turn on ourselves. It’s never otherwise.
What to do, then?
What to do?
~
My brother had three names in his short life:
1 - Len-Len, a cute approximation of Leonard, from birth to age four. Len-Len with a broad, placid face that puckered when I was born.
2 – Leo, from four into his twenties, the big brother I knew best though I didn’t. Know him. Leo walked me to school sometimes. No-talk walks. Just traffic blur and the skip-scuff of my sneakers on the sidewalk.
3 –Leonard, after he died, in emails from colleagues, documents and official papers. Leonard was paystubs and utilities bills, the ghost trail of a stranger. He was ‘close this account, please, the accountholder is dead.’ Spitting it out multiple times a day. Dying is an official act. Institutions insist on involvement.
…
The primitive mind is disturbing. For what reason did they learn to count? What was the moment someone needed five of something and instead of just bashing a head they invented a way to communicate the notion of five?
Five was what Leo said when he didn’t have a real answer. Five = I don’t know.
What’s the name of that tree? Who made you the boss?
‘How did your brother die?’
‘Five.’
~
Death certificates are incomprehensible. I don’t know if you know that. Something is clearly written but the mind can’t keep it in place. Letters scatter. I keep Leonard’s on hand for institutions to gnaw but I don’t know what it says.
I waft through his boxes, closets and shelves, trying to see what he kept versus didn’t throw out. Did the smushed paper cup fall accidentally and unnoticed or touch the lips of an early love, carry vital DNA, represent his first sale? Was it Leo’s or Leonard’s?
At night cords and cables slither to my bed and attack. One slips around my wrist, another my ankle. I hang from my arms or trussed like a hammock. Upside down, dangling. Blood heats my face, my skull shatters. I think I’ll die from the pressure but they know when to release me. I wake flushed and aching with my phone beside me. Battery 100 per cent.
~
Leo was nine when we found out he couldn’t sweat. He’d get hot, red. Eventually he’d faint. They called it anhidrosis and said there’s no cure but it disappeared when was 15. How did it feel when moisture finally oozed from his pores? The humidity of it. The unleashing. Did he drip six years out in one go or just a little at a time?
There was no celebration of the occasion but Leo needed something stuck inside him so anger stacked in. He piled it like firewood. He was his own effigy.
When Leonard died I tried to light up all he owned. House, garage, boxes, anything. I wanted flames visible to passing planes. But inferno is against city ordinances. City ordinances are like cables, I hang in them for days.
~
Numerologically 1:31 = 5. 1+1+3=5.
1:31 and 1:31 is two fives. Two I don’t knows. Do they cancel each other out? Does I don’t know + I don’t know = knowing?
What to do with such a chance?
What to do?
~
When Leo’s firefly danced I wanted one of my own. I wanted to hold it in my hand and feel it’s yellow-green kick, bounce, wave, step. I wanted to brag ‘my brother has a firefly and it dances on a safety pin.’ Like a fairy tale.
But Leo flicked on his lamp and pushed me out in the hall.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘You can’t hold light.’
Eirene Gentle writes lit, mostly little, usually from Toronto, Canada.
