Fingertips, cloth, tickling, then pushing and digging into the body under them. Wrapping both arms around. Squeezing with my chest. Pushing into, pushing forehead in. Smelling, smelling the smell that is dying. Will die forever. It’s last go here at my nose, my lungs, running through my blood, but even then leaking1 out through my veins. It won’t stay I can’t get enough. And with every breath the input is less. More leaves creeping in. Less of my son, more of leaves and all the other things. He, and even his leaving remnants, is everything alive, and the only alive thing. The whole world else is dead product, where can he live in me? Where can he remain? – nowhere.
I’m not alive enough either, and am not made to live by absorbing his death. I shuffle up, scoop and struggle to stand, then set him back down. Better to do nothing. Better to lay and feel the cool blanket around him convect heavily, bringing him back into being inanimate. I pull his body to a slat of gold to keep him warm. The sun shines through the thin trees, like always, relentless, deciding to now fucking take the smallest of my mind off of this grieving. I turn, lay down and maneuver my body in the dirt so that we face closely. The permanence is ugly. His permanent face is ugly, and not him, a black hole with my heart turning around and slowly into it. But also the last time I can see his smooth cheeks pink and white, and his nose, and brown hair, light and eager looking, as if he only fell. What an ugly thing that I can’t look away from. Time – 10 minutes…20? The sun has moved behind trunks. I can’t tell if I’ve gotten cold. I need someone to stop me, I will kill them if they try. Even just this: if I could lay with him half dead in the dirt. Instead of him dying more, even just that. I grab his arms and squeeze, angrily, but the energy it takes just makes him decay more. Better to do nothing.
Eventually it is fully dark. My senses are becoming bored of my dead son. I feel betrayed and I feel cold at my ankles, hands, ears, and I hear the ruffling of the forest and smell its rot. My body is not mine then, its own engine, forgetting my son so easily, not as I would or wish to. I easily let it go, I am existing the most at the memory of him, in the center of my head, a ball floating on slowly moving water. Yet something looms around the edges of this, too, creeping up to it, ruffling the shrubs. It is the miles and miles and miles of emptiness. No one is coming. To stop me, to help me, feed me, pick up his body, scold me. There can not be the hope that it might happen by accident, that despite all odds against, someone comes, that God proves in the last moment, right at his last possible chance, that he cares.
Now my mind is on this and now I notice the easement I’ve allowed, never to be barred off again. It will wedge, angrily hammer down and my sorrow will split like a log. The empty world wins, once again: the sun always moving time forward, the blank vastness making time spent useless, my own body obstinate against my command. Only for a few hours did my boy die, only during that time did I understand it. I stand up. I start a fire, laboring with numb hands. Right as the sun comes again, I bury the body.
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