I SLEEP WITH DEATH
She is weary tonight, in that noncorporeal way of hers. The living room is suffused with her fatigue. The air is charged with it. There is little I can do to comfort her, other than to turn on the TV and go to the Disney Channel. She loves the cartoons. Not the recent wonders with their more-live-than-life animation. Too much like work, perhaps. No, the early ones, Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willy, and The Skeleton Dance, with the ensemble of skeletons playing each other’s bones like xylophones, as far from that actual life it is her never ending task to end, end over end over end, until, as Donne, chiding her to be not proud, declared, Death, thou shalt die. But only a poet could believe in such a paradoxical deliverance for my poor unfathomable lover, who, astride the earth, labors eternally in the reverse birth that keeps the world from bursting at its seams.
How first she came to me, or how I felt her arrival, I do not know. Nor do I understand how someone so vast and all-encompassing could fit in the palm of my hand, or the narrow compass of my encircling arms, or the cramped chambers of my broken heart. Fortunately, as is the case with all great loves, neither knowledge nor understanding are necessary. I am one of many women, I suspect, who she has chosen with unerring instinct, one born to open herself wide and intimately take in her immensity, becoming her momentary rest from perpetual motion. I feel her ceaseless energy slacken and settle all around the house, a lessening that grows and fills both light and dark spaces, large and tight corners, fissures in the high ceilings and cracks in the wood floors. She fills this house the way she fills the world, but in miniature. And the world is hardly aware, sees not her, but only her work, and even that in just its outlines. I have looked into her billion eyes, ever changing, the eyes of a woman and a man and all the in-between, of the tiger and the lamb, of all things that fly above, crawl over, and burrow beneath, and I am so in love I feel I cannot bear it, but always do and crave with a dizzying desire the moment when I truly reach the point of shattering….
When I feel the breathless calm reach stasis and Death lies arid and dark as the Dead Sea at night, I quietly prepare the bedroom, moving with the crystalline care of the desert wind, flaming the candles with the exquisite match that I extinguish with scorching breath, drawing closed the hush shades, muffling the tickless clock beneath a cloth, pulling back the eiderdown and baring the 1000 thread count churned cream sheets, peel off my threads of reticence and lie precariously on the edge of delirium, filled with a fever more fervid than life can bear. Then Death’s heartless pulse begins its sudden quickening, and she arcs over oceans and valleys and plains and mountains until her very center hovers over me, the enormity of her presence sharpened to an infinitely thin and piercing point and while the countless multitudes course through her, she courses through me, and for a moment out of time, she breathes, yes, breathes as if alive….
When finally I can move again, I know she is gone and I am crammed full of emptiness, but alive still. The house also is empty, or vacant, as houses must feel it. Death has had her moment of respite, that only women born to provide it can gift to her. I sit and live and fill with a loneliness that gouges out the eyes of the world. But I will wait. I know Death will return. I am one of those she cannot resist. And one day, when my time has finally come, she will take me deep into her embrace, and we will be one, one in all, and all in one.
Paul Negri has twice won the gold medal for fiction in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition. He has edited a dozen literary anthologies from Dover Publications, Inc. His stories have appeared in The Penn Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Lunate Literary Journal, and more than 50 other publications. He lives and writes in Clifton, New Jersey.