This crown of thorns around my hips digs for buried bone like a dog,
Do you know how much coagulation factor there is in saliva?
I am a fentanyl addict seizing and vomiting in line at a soup kitchen.
You are narcan soup.
I’m estranged from my father. When he requested me on Facebook five days before Father’s Day, it felt like an act of terrorism. My hurt had personified itself onto my phone and there was no escaping it. I contemplated rejecting the request and wiping my phone as well as my memory of his existence. Now it feels like an act of God.
I wonder frequently if he thinks of me the way I think of him.
In Confession, I pray for forgiveness like I was the one that committed sin during our short lived relationship. Did I not fight hard enough for him? Could I have been the one to cure his addiction and untreated mental health? My Catholic guilt will forever punish me.
I work in Funeral Service and wonder what will happen when he dies. Surely he will be found in Red Hook with no legal form of ID, and purge covering his face. Onlookers of his overdose will gawk and express bewilderment in hushed tones, and then carry on with their day, because that’s what New Yorkers do. He’ll be a resident of the ME’s until he can be properly identified. Who will they call to identify him?
My parents are still legally married. Surely, she wants nothing to do with it. His two other children from a previous marriage are estranged as well; so to put it lightly, he has no one. He will be a direct cremation because he has managed to neglect every meaningful relationship he’s ever had. The bad thing about working in Funeral Service is I contemplate all of the logistics a normal person wouldn’t. It feels like my burden to bear, alone. God spoke to me, and told me to unbury my resentments to properly heal. To step into the peace I deserve. So, why is it so hard to accept his friend request? I know he will die soon, and I know I will cry. I will cry if I have never had spoken to him, I will cry if I do decide to speak to him. I will cry when the time comes to face the reality he is dead and no one else will want to deal with it, not even myself. But if not me, then who? Maybe just crying in general is the answer here. I pray.
Sometimes, I feel like Flesh to Fuck
And Flesh to daydream about Sharing
He has Fantasies about Sharing the Holy Parts of me
A Communion
I am no longer my body; I am the Host
I’m Just Flesh and Meat and something for Others
A Steak for dinner, served Medium Rare, just the way Men like
He takes me to our wedded master bedroom from our past life in which we committed suicide over one another in our children’s bathroom, and we were able to know each other, and then he puts his mouth all over me. He takes me to his childhood bedroom from our unlived, impossibly fantastical life where he would have poached deer out of his window while drunk on cheap whiskey with holes in his socks as a teenager and then become a domestic terrorist in a major city as an adult, where we would be able to know each other, and then he puts his mouth all over me. I do not want to say anything incriminating about our mismatched living and postliving life, but he puts his mouth all over me. He is not allowed. I want him to be allowed. I don’t know if this wanting is considered permission.
He apologizes for it with his hand over his mouth, dragging down his atomless face, his weightless teeth grinding, “I’m sorry. I am, truly. I know I shouldn’t. I don’t want to have to know it without you. That’s wrong too.” His hand clutches his jaw and throat at a boundary that I can feel when I am the one clutching it that I should not be able to feel. He says something remembered from sex. He seems like he wants to swallow these words but retches them out like he is disgusted by his bile, or disgusted that the statement asserts itself to be said with a cocked gun to his unbeingness, held at gunpoint by this statement to force him to pretend that it is accurate, “You make me fucking mean.”
He shudders. He shudders only when I make him nervous in conversation or overwhelmed during sex. He is afraid both times he will no longer have any of me. He is afraid both times he can never get enough of me.
I worked at a quaint specialty grocery store. I was pretty and odd and nervous like a chipmunk. He doted on me like a chipmunk he could tame into not being skittish, warm only to him. In two lives he was an honorably discharged veteran with complex posttraumatic stress disorder and became a career criminal when I begged him to get off his ass and get a fucking job. He gave me every object I wanted with ready cash without ever choosing it himself, he thought about me all day at work instead of coming home and being with me, and when he spoke to me it was without speaking with me.
He hardly speaks, still, he speaks more sweetly, sometimes less sure, sometimes more enthusiastic, as who he is now than in the other two lives. His words feel few no matter what he says, like there could always be something else said, unless his mouth is between my thighs so right and warm that I am too melted buttery, quivering puddly to speak back to him properly. He puts everything vulgarly adoring against me begs me to speak back in any little failed animal bits that I can muster because his pleasure devouring me devours him, he loves my words so much he wants to consume them, and he has a legitimate physical need to give me too much pleasure to perform anything, even simple language. If I am able to speak properly and easily, he feels worthless. Some recur. He says look at me. He looks like touching me has given him the flu— gleaming sweaty temples, shaky down to his knees and elbows, tired and hypervigilant eyes with blown pupils. He drools on me. He tells me that this is his body humiliating itself over me. He says ask me nicely when I think I am already being nice. When I scoff at this I know I have been proven wrong, which embarrasses me, and my embarrassment makes his breathing and rhythm falter. He says that I look like I don’t know what to do with myself. I say that I don’t. He says that he knows what to do with me.
I think in our shared time on earth he was cursed to only speak with clarity words prefixed and memorized and rehearsed from something written, someone else’s words assigned to him, so that he could be someone made out of himself but not quite him anymore, like a scarecrow with organs, making himself bearable to be out of language on a page. Otherwise, forced to speak organically from his own mind, he felt like every word he uttered he was vomiting up a tangled mass of wires sparking his throat on the way out, because they were his. I am cursed to spew unfinished thoughts with painful urgency, with an unintended air of certainty, a projectile stream that sputters, like peeing after holding it in on a drive so long you think you cannot survive the pressured sensation. I am much better with language on paper, like him, but with my own words, which are painfully specific to myself. I produce language in vacant isolation wherein I manipulate and configure language with my fingers to make it correct, like a Rubix's cube.
He kisses down my ribs and speaks into the softest center of my stomach, and my abdomen contracts and my hips still when says into my skin, “I wish you could write a part for me. You would write a part for me so extraordinary that it would make me fucking nauseated to read the script.” He speaks while his mouth is still finishing closing over my skin. “You’re a wordsminx. Like a wordsmith. But as a sexy little brilliant woman, too smart and strange with your Google Word Documents phone thing. I’d get imprisoned for stabbing a paparazzi for taking a photo of me kissing you that you didn’t want taken at our premiere’s after party. Your eyelashes make me fucking sick.”
He dotes on me like a chipmunk he could tame into not being skittish, warm only to him. He reduces my face to vibrating atoms when he tilts my chin toward him and teaches me, “Do you feel that? You’re pissing because I made you drink water,” as he’s learning it himself.
“Do you even have a body?” I’m dazed by my body.
“I don’t know how to explain. I have a body how you can feel I have a body.”
I’m dazed by the rugburn on my inner thigh from the night before of which there is no physical damage, no evidence, no indication present. He has a body how I can feel he has a body.
I know that I am on trial. I know that it is televised. I know that the show has poor ratings and low viewership. I am relieved and resentful about all of that.
An hour and a half before filming the last episode, the director and producer, who always wear sunglasses so that I can never see their eyes, sigh to me like what is coming is tiring, “We’ve got to submerge you naked in a vat of hydrochloric acid at today's hearing for just a second, a third of a second dunking, a third submerged, and a third hauled out. We practiced rigging with a dummy your size already. And then we'll rinse you off with a high pressure, freezing cold hose. Like, so strong it leaves trails of bruises.” I imagine the bruises from the hose-down will appear in the shape of anal bead sex toys all along my skin. I think more about what being dunked in acid and hosed off will feel like than why that has to happen. Then, I do think about why that all has to happen. None of these stunts ever raise ratings or increase viewership.
I open my mouth to ask why and the director grabs my shoulder and shakes it firmly so that only quick air leaves my mouth. He says, “It’ll make you look electric and alive. You tend to look too flat. Vacant. So we'll do that, and then when you get on the stand, you can sit in one of those big comfy fluffy sexy bathrobes they put pornstars into for exit interviews where they won’t pay them unless they wear the sexy bathrobe and laugh at the camera and say they love getting fucked by a brutish 56-year-old man with a severely bent penis who hasn’t washed his ass in 5 years and puts his butthole on her nose and whose cum tastes like gasoline and makes her throw up.”
I bite sharp dead skin off my lip, “But they’re paying them to say that they liked something that they didn’t like that hurt them.” I think that the producer probably rolls his eyes just by the slightest tilt of his head. I think about that. I glance at the set. I see the clear tank the perfect size for my body being filled with the perfect amount of hydrochloric acid to submerge me. I wonder its concentration.
I open my mouth again to ask if I am meant to like the stunts, or to say that I like the stunts, or to say that I encourage the stunts, or to say that I beg for the stunts, or what the concentration of the hydrochloric acid is, and the director’s fingertips hold me stiller with increasingly applied pressure. I shut my mouth so hard my jaw clicks and swallow my speaking air.
He insists with sleazy didactics, “Okay, you’re getting there, and it’s important that you make a stand that you’re pleading guilty, if only to halt the unending trial. We cannot keep deadlocking. Insist that being on trial is boring you, make yourself sound as vapid and girlish as possible, like, bratty nagging. Say that okay fine, the ruse is up, that you’re totally and solely guilty, and that you like committing crimes and that if liking committing crimes is a crime, the court should charge you for that, too. Say it like you’re pretend-bashful but know what you’re doing, like, playing coy and steamily alluring.” My brow tightens. The corner of my lip pulls in computational concentration. I’m not sure if I like committing crimes. I surely don’t like being the person that commits the crimes. But maybe I commit the crimes because I like to. I avoid thinking about it. I practice in my head how I will express through gingerly oculesics that I am playing coy and that I am steamily alluring, how I will pair my eyes fluttering and then rolling carelessly and then gazing lustfully precisely to my impish cadence. My affect will be naughty.
The producers notice I am spaced out. “Look, don’t think about it too hard.” They are starting to look exhausted with me, physically wasted, in need of a nap, as though I am a dense bog they are wading through, so anoxic every step is a pull and drag. Like they are wading through me to find rumored gold and only finding bog-bodied animals who in death take on the color of my copper hair.
'Don’t think about it too hard.' This is probably a crime that I am going to be accused of when the cameras are rolling. I think that it is a crime that I think rapid-fired hyper-articulate thoughts. I think that I'm not sure that I’ve even committed any crimes. Some of the crimes that I’m accused of feel like crimes that I was the victim of. Mostly all of them. I poke at my pointy hangnail. How can I be the victim and the perpetrator? How can I be the perpetrator and the victim? I know that I am committing a crime by even thinking such a thing. The sting when the skin detaches from my nail bed as I pluck out the dead skin. I like being my own perpetrator. I like being my own victim. I like not liking being either of these identity states. I think that I have an exceptionally fluid ability to be my own victim and my own perpetrator. I am self-cannibalistic and I am self-parasitic. My crimes eating my crimes eating my crimes.
The director drums his shoulders against my shoulder, “So what are your thoughts?”
I fumble with my thoughts again, wrestling myself for the one correct question out of my inestimable criminal questions. “Can I make a plea bargain for a life term sentence of house arrest and community service with no possibility of parole?”
They look at each other, or I think that they do, and they shrug. The eye-rolling producer says, “Yeah. We didn’t think of that. Not the worst idea. Whatever. We don’t even know if that makes sense judicially. We just need to get this show over with.”
My shoulder is patted fondly and released by the director. “To be frank, we’re throwing the last of our budget at this.” I nod as properly as possible. They casually nod at each other instead of me. They turn to walk to the technical director across the set.
The director turns back partway as they walk, pointing at me, “What are you doing? Go to costume. Go try on some robes.” The producer looks back and gives me a thumbs up.
I have POTS and ME, and lately even taking a shower has become difficult. My heart starts racing, I get dizzy and nauseous, my vision goes blurry, my legs start shaking, and sometimes I have to sit on the bathroom floor because I feel like I’m going to pass out. The ME makes everything worse because even doing something small can leave me exhausted, in pain, and barely able to get out of bed for days afterwards. I get horrible brain fog and sometimes can’t even follow a conversation properly. I’m tired of having to ask my partner for help with things I used to do myself. They’ve been really patient with me, but I worry they’re eventually going to get sick of it. I have two kids, and sometimes I look at them and wonder if they’ll even want to take care of me when I’m older, especially if I get worse. I know they shouldn’t have to, but I’m terrified of ending up alone and not being able to look after myself. I feel horrible admitting this, but sometimes I wish I’d never had children because then I wouldn’t have to worry about them watching me get sicker.
I got mugged when I was sixteen, and the guy held a knife to my throat, so I’ve been scared of getting mugged or stabbed ever since. About six months ago, my ex gf pulled a kitchen knife on me during an argument because she thought I was cheating. I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do and just froze. I remember staring at the knife and not really processing what was happening. She eventually put it down, but I stayed with her for a while after that.
My girlfriend and I met at work two years ago. Last spring she got the promotion I wanted, and I was pretty pissed about it. To her face I told her I was happy for her and even bought her a cake. A few weeks later I sent HR screenshots of her talking shit about a client in the work whatsapp groupchat. I was in the conversation too but I cropped my messages out. They fired her, and I even went to pick her up afterwards and took her out to dinner to comfort her. She couldn’t afford her apartment anymore so she told her parents in China that she was moving in with me. They hated that she was dating a woman, especially a masc lesbian, and her dad completely lost his shit. She hasn’t spoken to them since and they refuse to financially support her anymore. Now she’s been living with me for three months now and I pay for everything. She keeps telling me how grateful she is. She’s a lot less of a naggy bitch these days and pretty much puts up with anything I do or say.
I’ve been sleeping with a guy whose girlfriend pays to read my Substack. I found out a few weeks ago when I saw her name on my subscriber list. I thought it was funny and didn’t say anything to him. He only found out the other night because he went to see it for himself, he asked me to stop writing about him because apparently she’s been keeping up with everything I post. I told him I wasn’t writing about him, which is obviously a lie.
He says she knows who I am because she went through his phone and found screenshots of my Instagram stories. Or at least that’s what he’s told me. He’s actually shown me his hidden folder before, which has a ridiculous number of pictures of me, including ones I’d sent him and screenshots of my stories. Some of them are years old. This is so embarrassing, but I found it genuinely endearing that he’d kept all of them. We ended up having sex right after he showed me. I still think about that quite a lot.
We still get blackout drunk together and sleep with each other, and as far as I know his girlfriend has no idea. I know who she is though. I’ve looked through her Instagram more times than I’d like to admit, and she’s honestly very pretty. He tells me I’m much prettier than her. I feel a little bad for her, but I also think I secretly hate him. He made me feel absolutely horrible about myself for years, and sometimes I think I just want everyone involved with him to feel the same way. I know she hasn’t done anything to deserve that, but I can’t pretend I don’t enjoy knowing she’s paying to read things I’ve written about her own boyfriend.
The really embarrassing part is that I still get excited whenever he wants to see me. I don’t even like him anymore, I just really like knowing he still thinks about me when he’s with someone else. I hope he doesn't recognize me from this. Or maybe I do. I don't know. I guess we’ll find out how that goes.
I have been a funeral director for nearly two decades now. In that time I’ve buried mothers, fathers, infants, felons, doctors, war heroes, nobodies, and at least two rock musicians. I’ve seen and learned the many faces of grief. I’ve learned that grief is a shape shifting thing. It can look like nearly anything: fainting, someone clutching to the decedent, a fistfight in the parking lot, a fit of hysterical laughter during a eulogy, catatonic hazes, sighs of relief. Grief has a thousand faces and voices, those voices speak in various tongues, it knows many dialects, and I am fluent in all of them yet none of them are mine. I let their griefs occupy me, I am a vessel for it, and occasionally I can fill myself to the brim and let it spill over like languid honey. These instances are sticky and syrupy sweet. It is obscenely human. There are other times where grief presents itself as mucilaginous, in a mucky, plaque like way. During those latter instances I feel stopped cold and frozen.
The funeral home is mostly a comparatively unsexual place considering the constant roar and gurgle here and there of family systems, the emphasis on corporeality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness, the close proximity to death and mortality. I often feel like a professional stranger to these private tragedies. I guide them through the choreography of death; sign here, do this and that, choose a coffin, take a seat, now walk slow behind the hearse, there, that’s it.
The funeral will begin in five moments.
This morning I’m presiding over a viewing for a man I have never met. (To be fair, I rarely meet the people beforehand.) He is a banker, mid-sixties, survived by wife and one daughter, and apparently he’d embezzled money. He ran off to Brazil or Panama, where he was bitten by a spider and had a heart attack.
The chapel is hushed and pale morning light dapples the room. On days like this, when the turnout is modest, the room will echo with every cough, and every shuffle of feet will bounce off the high ceiling. Whispers and soft tones are adapted out of instinct, as if raising their voices might wake the figure in the coffin. I hear the wife’s bracelets clink against one another as she dabs at her eyes; the daughter’s breath comes in short sharp pulls, I hear it snag in the throat. The rumour about the money has already passed through the pews. This thought frightens me down to my marrow
Earlier, in the prep room, the banker arrived with a huge boner. This is not as rare as you might think, though this one had a certain stubbornness to it. I spent quite a while trying to tape it down. This, also, has less to do with prudery than you may be thinking. An erection under cloth is aesthetically disruptive. Compress, adjust, tape, retape. The skin is cool but insistently shaped. The whole ordeal had the feel of negotiating with some separate and posthumously uncooperative party. It held, finally, a subdued ridge beneath the trousers, and I told myself, not for the first time, that I would hire a mortician.
Now he lies in the open casket, face waxed into an approximate contrition. The daughter is at the front with her mother, swaying once, twice. Her shoulders jolt. She throws up on his casket, flashing the entire front row by accident as she doubles over. There is a moment of horror that follows any bodily expulsion. One’s face becomes too known; red as a leper’s ulcer, mouth slack, eruptive. Her breasts are like rabbit's eyes. I see it all because I am standing exactly where the angle permits it. I find this grotesque.
Her mother is splattered on the shoes by a slurry of boiled eggs, some starchy intermediary, and what appears to be cake with pink frosting, arriving in soft, humiliating globs between belches and violent scromiting. The puddle, also, reeks of whiskey and bile, as did the casket, and her mothers satin shoes, now filmed over in a sickly yellow sheen and studded with creamy pink frosting fragments. I wonder if it must’ve hurt. She throws up like a cat in dainty convulsive arches. Her mouth makes those dry sticky inadequate saliva sounds between heaves and little hiccuping gasps that quite frankly don’t belong in this room with its organ music and carnations.
I’m a tall, sturdy man, trained not to react. Instead, I pretend I’m a statue. A column that accrues lament like lichens and barnacles. Sometimes, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just left. Whether her grief is performance or pathology is beside the function it performs. The distinction matters less than one would think. What is clear is that the body does not lie. The body speaks in fluids and heat, it forgets decorum long before it could forget desire or grief. The funeral begins soon. This is the plateau where posture hardens into character. Focus; align the self with protocol; inventory dissent. Distinguish between fear versus whatever isn’t fear. Set aside the petty wardens of self image, doubts or reluctances. Arrange neatly, into rows, the little tight lipped cold footed men inside your mind. Fortify the mental armor. I avert my gaze; I try not to look at the glistening mound slowly cooling on the casket lid, nor the vomit covered shoes. It is important that my face stay neutral, that no one wonders what I am thinking.
The slideshow begins while we are still cleaning. Childhood, graduation, wedding, the banker in a beach chair with sunburned shoulders, the banker in a Santa hat, then in a novelty sombrero. Then, by clerical error or the medium’s own appetite for leakage, a foreign image intrudes. A picture of the widow's fanny arrives on the screen at the exact instant his body shifts forward, I watch the image bloom just as a dull, woody click sounds from the front of the room and the unmistakable thunk of flesh meeting the beveled edge of the casket.
It is an intimate, unguarded frame he must have taken himself, his age spotted hand is visible at the edge, entering from the margin, parting her mottled legs. Everyone recoils. There are gasps. There is a shared intake that registers as collective disgust.
At precisely that moment the tape restraint fails. What follows is not one sound but an ignoble series: the dry chirr of peeling adhesive tape, the percussive knocks against lacquered wood. His penis springs up from the hilt and then, freed, does not stop but swings, a small pendulum tracing a shallow arc under its own belated gravity, tapping once more against the casket before settling into a slow, mortifying oscillation. For a moment, no one can quite parse what they are seeing, eye and ear slightly out of phase, the motion lagging comprehension. The elderly mother of the widow looks like she might faint. For a moment she is less relative than prospective client.
If, through accident, compulsion, or the particular sort of desperation that passes itself off as curiosity, you ever have a chance to spend some time around the basement of this funeral home, you will observe many new facts:
- That mushrooms do not care about your spiritual intentions, only humidity and temperature.
- Spores will cling to cloth with a fidelity that perfume cannot rival.
- There exists a certain type who assumes ingestion offers a shortcut to revelation.
- Mushrooms imply a God diffused through substrate rather than enthroned above it.
- To belong to the kosmos is to be broken down and reallocated.
- Mycelium proceeds without spectators (a growth log becomes entertainment when all other company is exclusively deceased)
- That it is perversely more fun to anticipate a mushroom than to actually pick it.
- That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene around the dead, soil, meat, and fungi.
- Grief disregards dignity; it seeks only proximity and a vessel through which to erupt, demanding recognition and reappearing elsewhere when refused.
Every funeral produces its excess of figures, it’s sanctioned grotesque; today is no exception. A mistress draped in a fur stole sits two rows back on the aisle, the fur is yellowed at the muzzle. A man dressed like a pirate leans against the side wall. A woman bears tattoos that from afar resemble a cyborg, but up close resolve into a single tree, Yggdrasil, wrapped around her leg and down her ankle. These people, I recall, had called me previously to request grand things, a grander casket, imported Dutch lilies, open bar, yet didn’t have the means to pay for it. They called him Captaine, said they'd want to give him a grand send off. The family is unsure of who they are. Their presence here is less about the banker and more about the spectacle of his fall. (and rise)
Outside, a siren is muffled by the near silence of falling snow. The living world intrudes gently, I find this reassuring. The daughter is in the bathroom now, probably rinsing her mouth. The shoes sit in a plastic bag. The banker’s pants have settled into a more ambiguous position, thank God. The slideshow has been trimmed, not without casualties. I stand at the back of the chapel and, for reasons I no longer question, reminisce about my time in Prague.
Grief, in most rooms, behaves like the Nøkk. It answers to many names; anguish, despair, fury, relief, it takes on the slick green sheen of a river thing that wants to pull you under. It is a level of psychic poisoning wholly incompatible with the etiquette of guest books, floral arrangements, deodorizer sprays, ThanoSeal tape, formaldehyde, humectants, thick layers of restorative makeup over gangrene or decomp or bloat, whatever it may be.
Maybe this is grief leading me into its dark water, the Nøkk singing just beneath the surface, nestled within a current, waiting to lull me in. Outside, the sun climbs higher; cars hiss from the street. The mistress straightens her fur. The pirate closes his eyes and adopts an almost theatrical posture. The tree on the woman’s leg seems to move when she shifts. The widow no longer wears the vomit covered shoes yet still carries, faintly, the odour of whiskey and bile on her stockings. The daughter has changed into a sheer top, still drunk, two beatific red halos glow from behind black muslin, like two saints on fire.
When I close my eyes I picture the casket pulsing with the same kind of fungal bloom that threads through my mushroom kits in the basement, with a dull white mist settling over the banker’s body. Perhaps this is a theological function, perhaps it is a vessel for God’s hunger, or God’s shame, or whatever name grief goes by when it is no longer patient, because when grief becomes impatient it erupts, and the face of the daughter, flushed and contorted and bile wet, was no less holy for being so revolting. And even now, even here, among the various disinfectants and banker’s obituary pamphlets and laminated business cards with Psalms printed in blue, there remains the same open question, one I’ve asked every day for almost twenty years under the fluorescent eye of surgical lamps above embalming tables, and again this morning when the banker knocked indecorous against lacquered wood like a metronome, and I ask it still, standing in the narthex with my hands clean and trembling:
Can you petition the Lord with prayer?
