SUBSEQUENT TO OUR PASSING

I read in the Book that the dead gather in a Roman amphitheater and applaud us. They dwell in a cloud and watch us run in circles. Cheer. You asked if we’ll meet after death. Will we recognize the scars and wrinkles alight on our bodies? Still be married? Still be us? I don’t want to answer when only silence will do. Who’s to say the dead don’t have a future?

This essay wants to mean something. It doesn’t want to remain mere random hatch marks adrift on an ocean of white. It wants a direction. When you live on an island, all directions are geomantic. Down towards the sea or skyward up the mountain. Whichever way you go is ever lasting.

In my tin-roofed rancher, the dead inhabit photographs. They reside on my dresser next to the electric candles and cross and coral necklace. On the lanai floorboards, desiccated moths, their wings singed brown. The field mouse, bloody gash in its neck, that the cat lays beside my chair. I sweep the poor creature’s curled body back into the earth and bless the gift I was given. On this island, four volcanoes sleep, ooze, rumble, and rise. A fifth one, the grass-covered cone closest to my home, expired a million years ago. In my kitchen, behind the pantry door, containers of applesauce, almond milk, and ahi all bear a shelf life. My expiration date is written with invisible ink. Can’t figure why a part of me feels forever.

Like the writer, this essay wants its life to mean more than just what happened, but why. Next to the rusted fence, five cats and a dog play dead beneath the grass, underground. All foundlings. How many years and I’m still seeing them roll on their backs in the driveway? Energy doesn’t disappear, I tell you under a slip of dying stars. We’ll just convert into something else. My bones creak with unknowing. In other words, God.

When we bought the house, it came with its own dead spirit. The previous owner was killed in a motorcycle crash and you swear you can hear him rev his engine in the driveway. Our land once was the site of a settlement where Filipino plantation workers washed their laundry at an outdoor concrete tub. I veer away from its broken cement when I park my car on the front lawn. Sugar died in the 1970’s though the remnant cane grass now fattens the cows in the back pasture.

My friend Pua says the Night Marchers, those dead Hawaiian warriors, wind through the eucalyptus trees when the moon refuses to shine. I don’t say, but think, Superstition. Why stick around and menace? Aren’t there better things to do on the other side? I mean no disrespect. But this essay doesn’t want to believe in the other side, if it’s meanancing, punitive. This essay doesn’t want to fear specters haunting the hallways. Vengeance against the living or the dead is not what this essay wants.

Mother’s ectopic pregnancy nearly killed her. The doctor told her she would never have children. So she made a promise. Swore that if God granted her children, she would raise them to make a contribution. Three babies came into the world by her whispered oath. Despite this, I suppose I will weigh light atop the scales of Anubis.

*

And once where I live on Old Camp 17 Road, out in the pasture, a white calf died and the spotted heifers huddled around its limp body like a coven and cried all night.

And once, my friend Diane texted me that she and her husband Paul had contacted The Neptune Society. Stand-in mourners will scatter their ashes at a place of their choosing and spare their only child the logistical trauma. And I think Diane asked who I thought would bury us, since we had no children. And I didn’t have an answer. And I felt slightly dead having failed to birth another generation. I swear this essay wants a purpose. A reason to be.

And once, along the road where I walk in the mornings, I saw that someone had laid out the skeleton of a boar, its skull bearing a bullet hole between its eyes. And once, along the Akoni Pule Highway, I saw an Ironman cyclist remove her helmet and kneel beside a ghost bike, weeping. And once, I found a flattened toad next to the house and I picked it up by the leg and flung it over the barbed wire fence, making it hop across the sky.

*

My outside is the vaulted sky. A blue dome that arches and aches ad infinitum. A woman stretched into a backbend, her body an umbrella made out of air. In other words, God.

After all, this is Hawaii. A place where the divine cradles the sun and rainbows slide between ether shoulders. Here, the color wheel spins a wave that travels too fast for the naked eye. In its heart, this essay wants to be some thing. Incarnate. Formed. Occupying space and time. To be.

A sign of grace, perhaps. The things the sky forbids us to see. Like the future. And how the sky is outside everywhere. Still, invisible. High. Beyond me. Still, pressing close upon me with its breath, a quilt of infinity. This essay longs for the logos. Longs to bring worlds into being. Demands a resonant ending. L’chaim, I clink my glass against yours as the sun spools into darkness.

This essay wants you to know it is holy. It wants to find its second life in you. In other words, a God of my own making.

Linda Petrucelli’s essays have been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her story, “Figure Eight on the Waves,” won first place in the WOW! Women on Writing Fall 2018 Flash Fiction Contest. She’s lived and worked in Hawaii for the last twenty years. Read her at https://lindapetrucelli.com.