The day father died we all got ice cream. We had a history of grabbing cones on special occasions, but this one hit different.
We got our treats right before we went to see him—well, what remained, anyway—and lingered in the parking lot outside the funeral home delaying the inevitable, shuffling our sneakers through a sea of gravel and sweating in the sweltering summer sun. They were standard wafer cones, nothing out of the ordinary, but our fingers clutched tight—choking these flimsy things until a steady trickle of chocolate-vanilla swirl dripped down, down, down…gluing us to this muggy moment.
Forever, it seemed.
He’d asphyxiated in his sleep—unexpectedly, some might say, but one of us saw it coming in a dream a few months prior. It didn’t change anything in the end, but she saw it anyway.
The decedent, as stiff society called him, had been fairly young, middle of the road really, but such statistics hadn’t mattered.
We felt ourselves asphyxiating now too. Our lungs were still functioning, but we couldn’t breathe in this hellish heat, couldn’t tread water amidst this colossal loss. Despite our troubles and struggles, though, our lungs continued to inflate. On an arbitrary technicality, perhaps, but no matter how reluctantly, that was the brutal fact of the matter.
We were still alive.
Our timing wasn’t great. Well, neither was his, but it didn’t feel fair to blame him, this man who was already dead; it couldn’t get much worse than that, everyone agreed. Our complaints seemed so minor in comparison.
The funeral home was closing soon. In a matter of minutes. It was now or never, mouthed the undertaker glaring at us from behind some gaudy doily lobby curtain. He made an exaggerated effort to check the oversized watch colonizing his pale wrist, and collectively, we sighed at mean ol’ father time breathing his rampant rancidity down our necks.
Get on with it. Come in and see him. Then kindly get the fuck out.
Okay, he didn’t really say that, but his impatience with us was palpable. There was already this heap of guilt crowding our chests; we didn’t need more. Survivor’s guilt settled in the second we got the call; it had already burrowed deep within our ribs and guts and wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
The news set off this catastrophic earthquake within us and left this hideous fault scarp to demarcate the divide between before and after. Now, anything we did would wind up juxtaposed with the definitive inactivity of the dead. The constant comparison was our new go-to instinct.
All a corpse can do is rot, everyone knows that, but our brains couldn’t digest this meteoric lump of change. The impact was too great; we all gawked at the massive crater encircling us wondering how we still stood.
Certainly not to lick sticky fingers.
We were a downright mess—both inside and out—disheveled hair, sweat swamping our pits, wouldn’t be surprised to learn we’d left our shirts back home. None of us were there, no one was present enough to focus on practicalities. Logistics. Our bodies were running on an all-too-faulty auto-drive.
When the ice cream ran out, as it always does and we knew it would, we watched in dread as our one excuse for staying outside rolled over and died.
The time had come.
We weren’t prepped for the shock of death. No one ever is.
We tiptoed in—terrified to disturb the dead. Ashamed of our late-to-the-party timing. Entering a building that houses death felt wrong. Who were we to waltz in and gloat? We could never hide the life evident in our veins, but did we have to be so repulsively brazen about it?
Nothing about that ice cream was sitting right. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. The second we crossed that threshold, we were dying to bleach the splotchy stains of lingering sweetness off our tongues.
The same impatient man who’d been not so subtly eyeing us from his perch at the window guided us to the back corner of the building where our father’s body was on display.
The room felt like a shrunken post office; metal doors covered the walls, but the comparison stopped there.
None of us addressed the gigantic elephant in the room. A trunk could’ve trumpeted, sprayed us with a shower of hot shit, and we still would’ve continued our efforts to ignore.
This figure we’d known from birth had been reduced to this motionless fixture in the center of the room—propped up on a stainless-steel table and covered by a thin white sheet that reduced the familiar topography of his body to vague impressions.
No one spoke. The air smelled too sterile. A forced attempt to conceal the disturbing purpose of the room.
We paused there, holding our breath without any such intention. We’d never slurped such silence. Each of our hammering heartbeats, each reluctant swallow, each lump stuck in our cramped chimney throats resonated loud—thunderous drips upon a floor that was no doubt spotless prior to our intrusive arrival.
We weren’t left to stew in the speechlessness for long though. A murder of crows sliced straight through—their deafening caws flapping around the room in a jarring commotion, demanding our immediate attention.
Like the ruckus of a construction site roaring to life at dawn, the clamor woke us up. Brought us back to our senses.
And then we did the inevitable.
We made ourselves look.
We had to.
There he was. Hair too long, skin too yellow, body too dead. It was him but it wasn’t. More like one of those wafer-thin cicada shells ditched to cling to the trunk of its tree.
None of us said anything.
What was there to say?
Our grim faces marked by muted disbelief, we stared at this crowded cloud of sorrow being belched from our chests, buzzing around the room like a god-damn swarm. Horrified, we watched one after another emerge from our ribcages, watched them march out and colonize the empty space in the room. Our lips parted—as if to speak—but in lieu of words, the cicadas continued to crawl out on our red-carpet tongues. They slid out our eye sockets too, shoving our eyeballs aside. They had this fierce determination to get out in the open. To be born, we supposed.
We stood there crying, spitting, bleeding cicadas. They slithered across the room’s every surface, painted it with their bodies until it was all one black wriggling mass. We bore witness to our grief as it hatched into this uncontainable series of buzzes, clicks, and alien grunts—a deafening reverberating roar that flooded the void.
