I knew this the day I stared at my great aunt’s corpse. She looked asleep, as most corpses do, and I acknowledged her death with the same mundanity of the newspaper being tossed into the recycling bin or my dad turning the TV off. I knew what death meant; there was no confusion to me. It was just a simple fact: everyone dies, just like how my hot chocolate gets cold if I leave it on the dining room table for too long.
I took a white rose from her bouquet to bring back to my family, sitting solemnly in the front row. My grandmother was aghast and grabbed me, demanding that I put the rose back. She bemoaned curses and hauntings, and I couldn’t understand why that was so bad. After all, didn’t she want her aunt to stay with us? My dad, as amused as ever, gently took the rose from my hand. He led me back up to the coffin, and we placed it on her chest, on top of the rosary forever clutched in her hands.
Later, I asked him why it was so bad if my aunt stayed and haunted us forever. My dad had laughed loudly, and said that death would change you. The people you love aren't meant to stay with you forever, and people – despite all their words about evolving and acceptance – want things, people, to remain unchanged. I remember nodding despite my confusion, and him giving me a knowing look. He referenced The Walking Dead and told me that when he died, I should stuff his corpse like he was a taxidermy deer and place him in the corner of our bedroom. He will remain unchanged, standing in the corner of the room, and that will be his last kindness to us. I rolled my eyes, and the conversation ended. There were no more talks of taxidermized fathers or ghoulish aunts taking up space in our home.
When my dad died, I remember feeling nothing. In retrospect, I was far more distressed at the sight of him in the hospital bed, alive but unresponsive. I had tried to wake him up, like I did every time he decided to nap in the most inconvenient places (specifically the nice spot on the couch that got the most sunlight in the afternoon), but I couldn’t rouse him from this type of sleep. I tried regardless. He died a few hours later, without any of us by his side.
I was playing Minecraft when I learned of his death. My mother came out into the living room, haggard, and confirmed my assumptions. I paused my game, let myself be held, and allowed my mother and sister to cry. I didn't feel like crying then, and after a couple hours, I returned to my game. I fed my wolves and cats, and went back to collecting wood to build my house.
I attended his wake in my favorite yoga pants and old blue shirt. I didn't own a black formal outfit and didn't really understand why I would need one. After all, my dad was lying dead in his sky-blue coffin in a t-shirt in the most atrocious shade of neon yellow I had ever seen. I cited this to my grandmother, who spoke briskly about respecting my elders, and left me feeling more confused. My dad hated neutral and dark colors, I was simply dressing to his preferences. Wasn’t that showing my respect to him?
My mother took us every day to the wake, and I would amuse myself by memorizing his face and wrinkles. It was fascinating to see where my dad ended and where the corpse began. His veins were too prominent, his skin too transparent, and he usually snored when he slept like this. I placed a hand on him, and immediately recoiled. I thought back to his comments about wanting to be taxidermied upon his death, and believed for a second that my mother went through with his wishes. Its chest was too solid, and its skin was too cold. This was not the man I slept on top of every afternoon, or the one who woke up early every morning to cuddle me before we had to get ready for school. I didn't look at the corpse for the rest of the wake.
I remember distracting myself by playing the piano, located to the left of the casket. The piano was situated to face the coffin, but thankfully, it was too tall for me to see over. I didn't know what I was playing, but there was a need to break the somber silence. I played major chords, which were reminiscent of his pop songs that he loudly sang every morning. I stayed there, hitting the keys with a numbness I couldn’t describe.
My cousins pulled me away shortly after their arrival, and I busied myself with hugs and condolences and Kingdom Hearts. I sat to the right of the damned open casket and was just able to make out the top of his bandana. I fought the urge to snatch it from the corpse and place it back in his drawers where it belonged.
When they closed the coffin, I felt my heart wrench. For the first time, I was struck with an unbelievable feeling of dread and pain. I wanted to scream and cry, and to fight off every priest with their stupid ringing incense and calm voices. I wanted to shake my dad awake, to tell him this was a horrible prank, and that I was sorry for giving him a hard time about kissing him goodbye earlier that week. I wanted to call him dramatic for this frankly extreme reaction to me complaining about how affectionate he was, that I wouldn’t interrupt his naps anymore, that I'd never laugh at his middle name again if he would just wake up. In the span of a few seconds, the coffin clicked shut, and every piece of me shattered at once.
My mother said that I should have said my goodbyes before they closed the coffin.
Click.
I should have said "I love you" before I shut his car door that morning.
My dad died on a Saturday, and it was just that. I didn’t grieve, not like how others might’ve grieved, and I moved on without him. I missed him though, I missed him horribly, but I felt no sadness in the way my family described theirs. I pretended not to notice the stares and whispers, and refused to put effort into deciphering any of them. If anyone asked, I missed the consistency and the routine. I did not grieve.
It boiled over on a Tuesday, nearly three years later. The breakfast and dinners my mother prepared didn't taste the same. She burned the eggs and bread that my dad would always make perfectly. She refused to put Vienna sausages and hard-boiled eggs in my chocolate oatmeal because she thought it was gross. There was no breakfast for dinner, no adobo or sinigang waiting for me after my mid-afternoon nap. In my frustrations, I left the dining room table, went to the bathroom, and sat on the sink, just like how I used to when my dad and I were getting ready for bed.
The only thing keeping me company now is the hum of the fluorescent lights and the shaky rumble of the overhead fan.
I don’t remember anything other than the waves of dread, the rage at the unfairness, and the feeling of loneliness. Every memory rushed forth at once, and in clear, horrible detail, I watched my dad die again in front of my eyes.
I left the bathroom silently, and grabbed his jacket, and wished it still carried the smell of his cologne. I cried into the ugly stuffed turtle he gave me and wished that it was me that died, or my mother, or anyone other than him that had to go.
Grief made its home in my ribs, bashing against my heart and lungs, attempting to shatter what remained of me into smaller and smaller pieces. I fell into a restless sleep, wishing more than anything that these past few years were nothing more than a bad dream. I wished I was just sleeping in the back of his red truck, being soothed by the sound of his singing as he drove us down the highway near the Pacific Ocean. Any time now, I would wake up to him picking me up to carry me back to our home that overlooked the sea.
There will come a day when I will be older than he will ever be. I stood on his grave, taller than him now, and felt grief curling against my bones once more. I stared at his gravestone, with eyes like his, and wondered if he had to feel this grief too when his brother, my namesake, died far too soon.
I offered a quiet hello, and wrinkled my nose at the amount of goose feces littering his grave. He once complained about all the crap we had laying around the bed, and if I was in a brighter mood, I might’ve cracked a joke about him being a hypocrite.
I don’t know how to grieve, and I don’t know how to cope with it.
But as I’m staring at my dad’s grave, over ten years later, I’m beginning to think I’m starting to learn.
what movie do y’all know front to back like it doesn’t even have to necessarily be Good,, it’s just something you’ve seen so many times that the dialogue is printed into the very core of your being
Whenever I get a puncture wound I feel so smug towards any tetanus that might be in there. They have no idea about my sick ass vaccinated immune system. While you were crawling in soil my cells were studying Tdap. Now die by the hands of my learnéd warriors.
"Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability
Hot dog water - there's a Tumblr post out there I've seen saying hot dog water is the opposite of holy water, due to the fact that a single drop of it will contaminate what it touches. I assume this was partly inspired by this allusion but who knows for sure.
Also the the idea of holy water as inhuman and cleaning vs hot dog water as the remains of feeding someone - often a child - and entirely human. It may be dirty and I do not want it on me but God hot dog water has some memories. You will not wash away my sins. They're mine. Also, anyone can make hot dog water but holy water is refined, restricted (yes anyone can make it in an emergency but lay people are restricted from it)
"you and I both know"
Unlike baptism for babies, this one is done between two people who are both aware of what is happening. The one receiving the baptism gives the orders about what they want to happen. The giver and receiver are portrayed as equals. They are equally aware of their humanity.
"the holy stuff won't take"
Ooof heartbreaking, amazing line. Raises so many questions. What does it mean when the water "takes"? What has the receiver done that makes them unfit for holy water? Or, what has the holy water done that makes it to weak to help, to be a part of your life?
The poem as a whole - I love the lack of capitalization. It adds a sort of intimacy to the poem, and the statement from the speaker. The high words "baptise" and "holy" being offset by "take" and "hot dog". Also "hot dog water" vs "holy stuff." The cadence! I would lick it.
Not to turn this into another house full of chintz, but I'mma fuck this poem on the floor.
Meter
There are two readings of the poem's meter that I immediately identify, the first is how I'd want to read it, and the second is how a normal person would probably read it, but both make the same point.
In my interpretation (left), the first line is four wholely irregular feet: an iamb into a dibrach into two trochees; The second line is two trouches into a hanging stressed syllable; And the third line is three iambs.
In the more normal interpretation(right), the first line and second line are six trochees all together plus that hanging syllable in 'knowing' which transitions the poem to iambic trimeter.
And look at the interesting result of that laid bare:
In English poetry there's a tradition, all other things being equal, that iambs are considered the sophisticated foot with trochees often being contrasted as the vulgar or common foot.
The vulgar in specificity "hot dog water" is put in trochee, while the respectably vague "the holy stuff" is afforded iambs. Without the poet having thought of the stress things the pattern actively, this incapulation of the English poetic tradition is astounding. Especially when you consider the
Chiasmus
Chiasmus is a figure of rhetorical construction, in which two pairs of ideas are laid across each other, A B B A. It's one of the more popular figures of rhetoric and if you're looking for it you'll see it everywhere.
In the most literal sense, it's about repetition; but, you can apply it more liberally to ideas, thoughts, or in this case, parts of speech:
The nouns and verb pairs in the first and third lines crossover each other. They are in chiasmus. Structurally, the inversion makes the poem feel more solid, while still furthering emphasizing the contrast between the idea of hot dog water and the holy stuff.
Still the freakiest fact about him is that despite being as tall as a person or more, he banged out these beauties in a day or two at most (and smaller ones ina matter of hours). The longest he spent on a painting, at age 81, to make his largest ever painting, was TEN DAYS:
It is 2.9×4.3 meters large. That’s 9'4"×14'1" for people in other measurement systems. It’s HUGE. There are artists out there that spend years on paintings much smaller than this. He was not one of them.
He also didn’t only paint the sea, but he MOSTLY painted the sea. Very few people could draw light filtering through waves the way this guy did and apparently it was tied into his layering technique that allowed him to paint so goddamn fast.
“Still the freakiest fact about him is that despite being as tall as a person or more,”
Initially I didn’t realise this referred to the size of the paintings and briefly thought Ivan Aivazovsky was “as tall as a person or more” and imagined a freakishly tall Slavic artist lovingly painting the enchanting play of light and colour on the sea
My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.
Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.
dededos
dailybridgerton
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
