A Brief Biography of a Dead Body

The doctor’s words came again, clear and unshaken like God’s—You have to kill her. You need to end her suffering—as the man checked out an old faded photograph in colours of blue skies and reds and blues: a young version of his old self, brawn and happy, kissed on dimpled cheek by also a pretty young version of the woman lying naked, motionless, and snoring badly behind him.
Having studied the photograph he replaced it back to its position, on a varnished stool, alongside other material siblings, a light-brown watch and a ragdoll.
The ragdoll, a dusty multicoloured clothskin, has its jagged legs dangling beneath the top plate of the stool, with eyes as round as an owl’s, tainted by zigzag stitches that ran horror-like across its rubber visage.
The man peered distantly at these materials, each old with regret—and an irresistible dread formed at the apex of his emotional trophic level.

The snoring woman, perhaps in her late fifties, had told him justifiably like a witness in a court of law, that she wished their death came at the same instant of time. Her puerile assertion, as the man thought her words to be, would have went down the abyss of senescent excesses, if only at that moment, her weakly set jaw had not went almost as stiff as her inanimate brown eyes.

The man’s response came out stiff and silent. He had stared at the woman whom he shared fifty years of his life with, a dying cancer patient, and wondered what-in-the-name-of-what enchanted her with such beauty of death—philosophy, old age, or one knowing death so early, so painful, that one is broken enough to admit that death can or will be sweet, and that one begins to borne their loved ones into such vain sweetness. He had pressed her almost-bald head to his chest till she dossed down on the bed, snoring.

The man pressed the blue pillow over her face till she became breathless.

On such days, when happiness was too reaching, they would have gone to Rojenny, watched life animals, sat on the well-trimmed carpet grass scooping vanilla ice cream and eating buttercup cakes, and on the way back home, swung their head rhythmically as they sang, feel us hot hot. Those were better days when they played the game, The Grave, under the flame tree with their only son who was now married, and lived at Black Quarters, hundred miles away from home. During the game, they would pretend to be at the last moments of their deaths. And within this moment tell their wishes.
The snoring woman always wished to be free like air, shapeless like love, and to become an angel living under heaven’s roof. Their son always wished to be a ragdoll. The man always wished to have the same family in his next world. But after her wife was diagnosed of breast cancer, everything took a bad turn and, perhaps, within all shades of happiness, there was a change so unusually inviting.

He stood up stark Adam, directed his clumsy steps to the endpoint of the room, there he took a pair of black trousers and a rumpled primrose-yellow T-shirt which he pulled over his body.
He casted another hasty look at his wife, her almost busty figure reduced to bones, eyes as white as whale’s teeth, and then walked out. Outside, the man sacked up in outpourings of fear, traced his way between the trees, slowly and steady, till he reached the spot from which one can view the vast sea fogging the air around with much freshness and saltiness that can choke one up if inhaled much.

The sea was still. The evening air was silent. Like the world imitated the man’s vulnerability at the moment, a mélange of confusion and undone things. He marched forward, the sea swallowed his six-fingered feet, ankle deep, caressing its dryness. The sea as though conscious of the untimely invader welcomed him with tumultuous waves that sent his oversized apparels flying windward. Maybe tired of watching the sea or holding strong against the cold crawling soothingly from his feet up to his head, the man walked up to huge rocks scattered under a dome-shaped blue tarpaulin with stylistically written Bay Corners stacked to one of the foundation bamboo sticks.

He sat down. He stared into the sea. No! Not the sea, the way his head titled to an obtuse angle and his eyes roamed was rather searchingly than exact. Whatever he could be searching for, in that not-too-long moment of calmness and stare, was coming. He could feel it bubbling up his spine. As when one is about to see a ghost: head reduced to firm grip of horror images of trees reforming into ghostlike humans, windblown nylons reforming into carnivorous birds streaming in line to suck blood, sudden crackle of leaf blades resounding into footsteps, the moment a wasp made to kiss his forehead and he hand-batted it off.

Someone was coming from the sea—naked, bald-faced, baldheaded, back slightly hunched, hopped upper trunk on both legs when walking—towards Bay Corners.

The Ghost stood before him, younger than he remembered, teeth baring, then said rather lightly, Is this how you welcome your wife? Not minding for a reply, she sat down beside the practical man, their body almost touching. But the practical man could not help but think their bodies touching. The Ghost’s body melting into his body, taking control of his form, his spirit, his blood. But still he did not look at the Ghost, but rather pretended to keep his eyes dragged consciously onto the sea.

I am sorry. . ., the man said plainly. And for the first time after his wife’s death broke loose in tears. As the old days reached deep inside him, then lured him back to the beginning, back to happiness or love or something bigger than both, and then he fell deep into the sea of remembrance down to where a shout escaped his mouth.