The Taste of Rot

I took my last breath on the strike of noon. The sun was at its highest, the heat at its strongest, pouring through the window and across my body. Feels unnatural, doesn’t it? Death in broad daylight. 

Death is for the night. Something that catches you in the shadow, something that lurks in the depths. But crucially, something that can be evaded. With the strike of a match or the rotation of time. Something, other, something opposite. That thought is a comfort. It was something I considered, breathing into my freezing palms in the dead of night - something to shake me awake, something to know was far out of reach, when the morning crow had cried. 

That was, of course, not true. 

Such a fact could not have been more evident by the time I, well, departed. The spring flowers, bursts of fresh lilac in the room - the sound of passing feet, of passing chatter. Of the bustle and cries of a house so awake, and so alive. 

(Though now, with one notable exception). 

It was horrifying, and terribly inconvenient, I suppose. My death left the pot, ready to overboil. A child, ready to be changed. A husband, vacant, working, away. There was no time for bedside wailing, or dedicated vigil, there was no solemn chamber to trap the coldness of my body within. I lay dead in broad daylight. A vulgar display of my own mortality, and in utter contempt for it. 

I think, though nobody asks my opinion, it was this that makes it so hard. Death, I mean. This was the biggest pain. Not the grief, or the trauma, or the empty seat left to fill. It was the way death had broken free, seeping into a world where it didn’t belong. It was the way the bony fingers, my bony fingers, crept along a shoulder, but now with no way to banish them.   

Because, they're so afraid of dying. All of them. The daughter, threads of long, blonde, matted hair reaching, tickling a nerve on my face that has grown so newly silent. The claw grip, shake and scream. The horror in deep blue eyes. 

You can feel it in the way they drop you. The second they see the glass sheen of an iris or hear the deafening silence of an empty chest. The way they’re scared it’ll rub off, sneak under their fingertips, and carry them away too. 

I want to rage at them, I’m their mother. I remember, like the pattern of an old piano-tune, the weight of their bodies in the cavern of mine. I remember their first cries and pleas and wails and laughs. I remember each mark and tear on their skin, have memorised the nooks and crannies of their hand in mine more than any map - and there I was. I had become a strange thing. I became monstrous. 

So, they send me away, that’s the fashion nowadays, anyway. To be out of sight and out of mind. They strip my bed and leave me with a slab. They don’t stroke my hair or tuck me in or ask me if I’m scared. I became, all so quickly, something to be dealt with. Something to be disposed of. A burden, a number on a list of parish finances. 

They left me there. In a small wooden box, with no light, so touch - just the taste of death in my mouth and those last words ever spoken rattling around my head: 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. 

So I was glad. When they came to get me. 

At first I thought it was heaven. The sudden light, the prized top of my own box-prison. Maybe angels did wear all black, maybe they did speak in angered hushes.

How was I to know what the afterlife would be? I’d never died before. 

Somewhere though, between the swearing, the pulling, the tearing of my clothes and the rough scratch of the barrel that they threw me into, I realised I was mistaken. I would have laughed, had my lungs still had the air - I was being bodysnatched. 

I’d heard of bodysnatching, obviously. And the resurrectionists, and the pleas, and the warnings and the pure moral panic. But it never was of concern. There were more pressing issues to me, living things to protect, little time to worry about the discards of life. You never envision yourself as the body in the barrel, the guts strewn across a lab and pickled in a jar. 

Yet the doctor, or surgeon, they took me to (for he never gave me a true introduction) was different. He didn’t seem like the resurrectionist monster, robbing people of purity and peace, nor did he seem the tortured medic, desperate to do good. He didn’t have students, he didn’t have a scalpel. He had a machine. And when the hunched figures of the body-thieves had retreated, with the valued total of my being’s worth lining their pockets, he placed me inside it. 

My nerves had died, frazzled and burnt and disconnected, and yet somehow, I still felt the sharp metal permeate my skin, still felt something draining, something pouring in. I still felt the decaying muscles contract and release, like strings pulling me together. I still felt the eyes in my head roll back, spinning in the sockets till they came around anew. I still felt my skin ripple, and tighten, and change. 

It was then that I learnt I could do this. Talk, think, see, feel. And, the strangest part was it didn’t feel like waking up. Rising from my death didn’t feel like emerging from the deepest, darkest of slumbers - it felt like being born. A phoenix rising from the ashes, in a mildew basement, covered in wires and rot. 

At first, I had hope. I think it was the shock. I pictured myself standing, smoothing down the creases of my dress, pinning my hair up, and walking out onto the street. I pictured returning through the front door. Enveloping the children in my arms, laughing at their disbelief. 

See my loves, it’s mam, the monster’s gone. It’s all gone. 

And like the children they are, and the children they were, they’d laugh. As if my rotting corpse on the kitchen floor was the mistaken, monstrous shadow banished by candlelight. 

I realised my mistake when he entered. The man, the maker (he still never offered an introduction). I realised my mistake in his eyes, impossibly round and opening, faster and faster, in his mouth - gaping and afraid. I realised it in the soft shake of his whole body. 

It was only then that I turned to look at myself. 

My flesh was a deep purple, wounded and festering, it gaped holes that sunk right to the bone, yet it had calcified, in life? In death? I didn’t know, except that it had become thick and unmoving - a candle frozen halfway in motion. My jaw was fixed, sharp, poking from beneath my face, fixed in a snarl that suggested an imminent pounce, and imminent tear. My eyes were sunken and yellow, shrivelled from disuse, my mouth a deep gash into the still red, still warm centre of me - though it no longer beat. 

You’d think, upon seeing this, I’d feel horror. I’d feel pain. I’d feel the agony of a lost, no, eroded, identity. But I didn’t. What I saw in the reflective metal surface of my birthing chamber was as natural to me as the blue tint of the sky. 

Because, it was then that I realised I was not that woman who died on her kitchen floor. 

***

In life, my favourite word was rhododendron. I liked the way it felt to say, the satisfactory syllabic punch. But I also liked how tangible it was. How it existed as a beautiful thing that I could cup, and feel, and own. 

Yet sat here, looking at my reflection. I have a new favourite word, equilibrium. 

There’s something to it. But it’s not in the way it hits the tongue, it's the way it satiates the palate. I understand it, better than anyone, really. 

Because it’s the push and the pull of everything. It’s the declaration that every action, every marker, every word, speaks into existence its worst enemy. It’s own undoing, its fatal flaw, it’s Achilles heel. Whatever phrase, idiom or euphemism you prefer - I welcome it.

I was not that woman who died in broad daylight, in the false safety of her own home. I was the hole she left behind. Every moment of her life, every cell of her being and experience of her youth had carved out the pattern of who she was, but in doing so it carved the shape of me out too. Her other, her opposite. Together we make a whole, but separately we contain exactly what the other lacks. 

Consider the warmth of her touch, the softness of her arms - who is it that gives you the cold, the hard, to contrast it with? Who chooses the callousness to make her so kind? 

I do. Me. The violent other. 

The man, who, now, with eyes sharpened, eyes focused, looks so so familiar, a hole in my being (something that must have belonged to her), screams. His lungs empty, his blood bubbles. He sinks to the floor writhing, screaming. Some part of me, an echo at best, wants to go over. Hold him, touch him gently. But if her touch was soft, and loving, mine is not. I feel his body crush and splinter beneath me. I feel her grief, so I breathe in joy. 

Maybe it would have been easier - for him - if we didn’t view our shadows, the photograph negatives, as an ugly byproduct. As a mistake, a waste, or really anything that we could ever conceivably remove. In reality, we’re the givers, the enablers, the eternal springs that facilitate your existence. You owe us a debt of gratitude. 

Although, of course, I would say that. 

So, I stick to the territory that you people give me. The dark, the silence, the solitude, death is for the night - so it's here I live. But still, it’s hard to be other in the land of the self. It’s hard to keep sustaining. Every crack I make reflects back to me. I’m dropping where I stand. My limbs become loose - skin cracking and flaking. 

Soon I know, sat in the dark, in the alley behind the kitchen where I made my arrival, that I won’t be, anymore. I won’t die, I can’t die. But I will no longer, be. 

Yet, think of the dust that covers your home. Think of the spot of mould, of damp that creeps closer to you from the corner. Think of the new rattle in your chest, the new ache in your knee. Think when you wake, of the sleep in your eye and the foulness in your mouth, and know, that’s the taste of rot. The taste of me.

And it’s the taste of inevitability.