John Biscello

(Excerpt from Worlds Last Imagined, novel in progress.)

Last night Ariana and I attended our own funerals. It was something we did from time to time. We saw ourselves, lying there, pretending to be dead, saw a wavering horde of faceless and nameless figures weeping and going silent for us. I held the silence close, and listened in. Then I placed the silence inside a jar, labeling it Adagio Silence. Who were these people? Where had they come from? Why were they mourning us?

Ariana looked at me looking at her, the dead her. You look so beautiful, Ariana, I said. You look like an angel dressed in winter white.

Ariana smiled and said I was always, without trying or realizing it, always finding words, the eight words, the warm ones, the living ones.

Ariana’s compliment left me breathless, like babylegs kicking me in the belly. I looked down at me, somebody’s idea of a portrait. Like staring at the sun, or into a mirror without end, you can’t look for too long. A careful glance, a passing one. To see yourself dead required a well-practiced casualness.

I asked Ariana how long we should pretend to be dead. She said she didn’t know. The theater of playing one’s own ending was irreplaceable.

When the visitors left, a new silence entered the ceremony. It brushed against me, like small muzzy animals. I left this silence uncollected, didn’t name it. I stay on guard against becoming greedy and gluttonous. I heard the laughing first, then saw Ariana rising from her dead, and because her teeth were painted red, she now looked like a different kind of angel, a teasing one, a demonic one.

Are we done pretending, I asked Ariana, who often did this, just started resurrecting without saying a word, levitating above her casket, and I noticed the casket’s interior was lined with pale violet satin, a nice touch, elegant, Ariana moving over snowdrifts darkened with fresh blood, moving into winter, away from herself and into herself all at once. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I witnessed Ariana’s resurrection, not my own. Still, I mourned for us both, I played at mourning for us both, gave my best theater to pity and grief.

Ariana stood by my side, staring blankly at her empty casket. I stared at her empty casket, then at my empty casket. I asked Ariana if she was going on as Ariana, or … was that who she was, who she is now? She didn’t respond. That silence I preserved in a jar and labeled it Identity Silence.