prompt: comely, title: for dying out loud in misc. flash fiction

Most of us don’t get to carefully choose our last words but he did. Most of us don’t die so neatly, it’s too sudden or we’re in denial or our minds too far gone from illness or fear to wax eloquent, there at the end. My own father, ambushed by a heart attack, collapsed into my brother’s arms barely able to sneak out a reassurance that everything would be okay. Some of us get the mixed blessing of simply leaving in our sleep, knowing our sickness, knowing it near but not knowing how near, making the fade without some clear attempt at closing remarks. But this man wasn’t like most of us, he’d been tipped off to his timing.

There in hospice, surrounded by wife and children and friends, a phantom appeared before him, only his eyes could see her. She looked like the one girl who sat in front of him in English class when he was young, the great mistake he never made, her legs seeming two thirds of her body, eyes deep and dark and vast as the skies outside town on a winter’s night, as deep and dark and almost as vast as the next life preparing to welcome him.

“You’ve little time left now,” she murmured in a voice only he could hear, “just a few words for them to remember you by. Make them count.”

“You’re not her,” he whispered to the comely young woman, not the one that he married, not the one he shared a pretty good back-end of his life with, rather an image of one he still wondered on time-to-time, not exactly regret, more like nostalgia, “you’re not her but I know who you are.”

“You like it?” Death smiled and gave her illusion a twirl, the tie-dyed tee-shirt and faded denim skirt spinning like fallen leaves on an autumn breeze, “Picked it out just for you.” He smiled. “Other than what’s already here, it’s all I could have asked for.”

“You don’t have long, love,” she said, “do make them count.”

A few of us get to face firing squads at the end, get to spout something charmingly tough, telling the bastards to shoot straight. A few of us get the electric chair and run out the clock demanding a last meal of un-popped maize kernels in the hope we will in death go up like a goddamned tin of Jiffy Pop. He didn’t get that, just a bed, surrounded by a world that was half what his life had given him and half what he’d made of his life.

So he perked up, to the surprise of those who’d just seen him muttering into the nothing, said his good-byes and his I-love-yous, all the expected stuff and then added: “But most importantly, the hidden treasure is buried at…” with his very last breath.

“How was that?” he asked as they walked off toward Oblivion’s mystery. “I’ve heard better,” she smiled, “but I’ll grant you, not better by much.”