flash fiction by ava jane glenski

I Will Be a Village in Sudan

I am watching my funeral. You are clothed in black coats and beauty. Outside, the air is frigid, because it would be an impossibility for me to die in the warmth. I am not sad about my death (or maybe I am, but it is irrelevant, because there are more pressing matters, and there is no time to be sad for my death when I am so preoccupied by you), more I am sad that you have already begun to look at me as an abstract dead girl. 

There is a village that lives in Sudan, dancing in the sun, surrounded by wafting sand, in which the houses are built out of the walls of a dead pyramid. It is named El-Kurru. I do not want to patronize you, but if you do not understand from that statement alone, I will have to make it clear: they took the walls of the pyramid, which had been floating alone in the desert, devoid of people and motion and activity, and built from it their homes, markets, and lives. Now, “What a scandal!” they have said. They believe that history is stagnant and dead things must remain dead because it is beautiful, grand, and religious. Listen to me, because I do not want to yell: I do not care if it is sacrilege, I want you to tell the embarrassing story about me from last summer, to be angry about our fight over the mess you left in my room, to joke about my flaws, and to yell at my ghost, even to talk to the air on an afternoon when we would normally spend time together, because I will listen. I want you to think of me as part of the present, because yes, my body is in a grave, but was my body ever of any relevance? When we loved each other wholly, was the physicality of my presence in the room what held us together?

I said that I was not sad about my death, and that was true, because I was not sad about the physical act of dying, but, now, watching you and your black coats cry over my empty body, I am heartbroken, because in your way of being you have killed me again, relegating me to the past tense and memories rampant are resurrected every time a man laughs in his kitchen, a child cuts her knee on the wall, or a party is thrown. The pyramid was not built to sit in poetic silence, alone in the sand, but it was built for life and is now used for life. 

Drowned in tears, when just last Tuesday we were laughing in your apartment.