We begin walking on a grey evening
along uneven pavement.

Two ducks join us, quacking. 
I recall how, last time we walked so far,
you sprouted vibrant sirakaikal
and flew away.

I dwell on those dark blue tail feathers
an orange flash under your wings
the shriek from your new-beaked throat
vivid in my dreams.

Confined to a lower plane, we could not travel so fast:
our feet must play roulette with landmines.
Only a little further, said we, left behind, 
to reassure one another.

There are different paths to escape.
I can never love you less
for changing shape while we crawled 
a little further, and further, to safety.

No, mine were tears of relief that 
you needn’t feel your throat parch, 
needn’t beg a handful of dry rice from strangers, 
scoop water from chalky puddles

while the children watched 
from your back that bore them,
needn’t feel the ground shake 
and hold their thin legs tight.

From the clear sky, did you see tumbling treetops,
thick smoke that choked us, columns of ants
as we marched past the wounded, the dead,
to swarm around flecks of sickly safety?

Did you fly so fast you crossed into a calmer future
wherein the world stayed still?
Did you stop too, then, on a sandy shoreline, 
watch sea breeze sweep coconut palms?

Or did you return to a peaceful past, and fly alone 
across oceans and snow-covered mountains,
soothed by chill winds in whose rush, nonetheless,
you heard phantom explosions and weeping?

This time, we have brought neither money, nor jewelry, 
nor food, cooking pots, kerosene stoves, lamps.
We do not know why we are walking, this time,
when the places we left were safe—

Only that we inhaled a wanderlust 
from blood-soaked dust
from powdered plaster
that was once walls of shelter

From the ash of corpses
on funeral pyres 
of those who were lost
before they could wander.

So, we journey by the side of this highway,
stumbling over cracks where tree roots fight concrete.
The trees were here first—
I think they are winning.

When the path disappears, we stay close to traffic 
hands on cold metal barriers guide us
the skin of our fingers snags on rough edges
cars pass in a rush, ignoring our struggle

I understand in the future, we are all dead
and now is merely the time we take
to catch up.

Yet I want to know:
Have you kept your peacock wings? 
Do you fly ahead 
to seek us a gentler present? 

A time in which we don’t leave our homes forever
in which we don’t always, only, see battles
in which we exhale, and rest, and travel is joyful?

We approach the coast—the sea rises to greet us.
In search of you, we traverse this landscape of ages.

Tehnuka (she/they) is a Tamil writer and volcanologist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She likes to find herself up volcanoes, down caves, and in unexpected places; everyone else, however, can find her online at www.tehnuka.dreamhosters.com, and some of her recent speculative writing in Apex, Uncanny, and If There’s Anyone Left. 

Return to Issue 29 | Support The Deadlands

The house is not a house. And yet, I am a guest, a knowledge that rests in my mind with the certainty of a swift pen stroke or a happy smile.

The house is mostly white, two stories tall, roofed in lichen and gray shingles. The path I stand on winds a lazy S across a lawn dotted with daisies, buttercups, and spring crocuses. In the flowerbeds, there are primroses and chrysanthemums, somewhere in the shadows to my left, a few Christmas roses avoid the sunshine. Behind the house, blue sky is too slick for even the faintest hint of clouds.

I am invited. I know this. I walk up to the door.

The noise of the creaking hinges of the front door is old and new. It is familiar. The house is not one I have ever lived in, or is it? If so, I don’t remember, but then, who says the house isn’t remembering me?

I only notice I am walking into the kitchen when I smell the food on the stove. It’s something I haven’t smelled in so long—everything stew, we called it, leftovers really, but brought together in that kind of way that will make the whole taste good.

I move closer to the pot—faint robin’s-egg blue—and lift the lid. It seemed so heavy, ages ago, but at that time, my hands were smaller.

“It’s not quite done. It’s never quite done.”

I turn at the voice, my heart thundering in my chest. “Gran?”

She is. Hair in rollers and wearing a pastel apron with daisies on it, she has her legs crossed under the table and a cup of steaming tea in front of her.

“Yes and no,” she says. “I am only a guest here.” She smiles. “You know the type of party, all the round birthdays, but the high ones? Sixty, seventy. It’s like that. And it’s not like that at all. You are wearing no shoes.”

I look down at myself, and see that she is right. My feet are bare and… spotted. Do one’s feet get wrinkles? It must be a trick of the light, or maybe something that happened when I walked the garden path.

“You think that happens from walking down a garden path?” Gran asks, and she turns to fiddle with the ancient radio I now notice on the shelf on the wall behind her. It is silver and has an antenna. I had not thought of that radio in… decades? Decades.

“Did I say that out loud?” I ask.

Gran shrugs and lifts her cup. There is a rose on it, but the print has faded on one side, like blush on your cheek that needs touching up. “In a way.” She gestures to a door in the kitchen. I don’t remember that door. “The stew will be ready later. When you are ready. Go on. Greet the guests.”

I don’t think I ever refused Gran. Hers was the first body I saw, and I remember thinking, she’s gone, she’s no longer in there. The body didn’t even look real, although it was, of course. But something happened, then. I accepted grief, and accepted that all Gran had been lived on in me—in my memories and stories. What we closed behind the lid and buried under the earth, that had been nothing more than… a house. One she had lived in, a good life.

I cried so much that day. Moving away from a place you have loved forever can be hard.

The next room is no room at all, but a public outdoor pool. No one here is moving. There is movement everywhere though: a rainbow-striped ball being tossed between two boys in bathing shorts, smaller kids running, a woman lying on her belly on a blue beach towel, turning the page of her novel while unseen wind moves the corkscrews of her curled hair.

I pick my way to the spot I just barely remember, feeling the grass under my feet, cut short and somewhat rough for all the towels that tease it day in, day out. The pool on my left is crowded with bathers, diving and jumping, and fat drops of water hang in the air like jewels.

I stop when I feel something hard, a sharp pain, under my left foot. I look down. The body of a dying bee twitches on the ground under my foot. I can see its small black and golden body spasm in death, and I feel bad. How long does it take for a bee to die?

A noise pulls me forward to the spot I’ve been heading toward. Shade from large trees showers the towel island in coins of light. The small girl is wrapped in a penguin towel of all things, and her face pulls into awkward angles of pain.

Her left foot is in Mom’s lap, and I haven’t seen Mom that young in—in very, very long. What had Gran said, sixty, seventy? Has it been that long? Longer? The girl looks barely ten. I recognize her sun hat, and I know without walking any farther that it has a comic panda bear on the front. The girl has long hair, braided along her spine. It is dark against the ice and snow of the penguin landscape.

I barely even remember a time when my hair was that color. I stand there, still at some distance, debating whether I should go on. I know, just know, that if I do and look into the girl’s face, some unseen finger will slip off the pause button, and this all will replay. The boy suspended in the air above the water will jump in with a splash, and the woman with the novel will get to the next page. I will smell sunscreen in the air, and maybe ice cream too.

It’s a happy memory, but in the end, I turn around, avoiding the bee this time, which is still writhing and writhing in its eternal death. I head back to the unisex changing cubicles in their shed-like structure.

I go to the first cubicle, and from it, I walk elsewhere.

I come out on a balcony, overlooking a city at night, bright with illumination and bustling with activity. Leaning over the balustrade with a drink in her hand, I make out the wave of blonde hair that is Jess, the curve of her ass, the arch of her naked feet.

“Hey,” I say.

She turns. “Hey to you.” Her smile is a half-formed thing, like a loaf that has sat in the oven for barely ten minutes.

“Shit,” I say. “Did I just break up with you?”

Jess shrugs. “You kind of did, but that’s okay. It was a good decision actually.”

“But you were so… so…”

“Pissed?” she suggests and lifts the glass to toast me before she takes a sip.

“Yeah.” I look around, annoyed that I didn’t bring a drink of my own, but the best they ever had at the pool was soda.

“Here,” Jess says and holds out the glass to me. It’s a tumbler, and I know she’ll have cognac in there, her favorite.

I look at the glass, then shrug. “Not my kind of drink, but it feels like one of those nights.”

“Doesn’t it just?” she says. She is quiet for a long moment as I look at the amber liquid, then watches me with thoughtful brown eyes as I bring the glass to my lips and drink deeper than I ever have. I cough. She grins. “You know we could have been good together. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

With one last cough, I hand the glass back to her. “How would I know why you’re here?”

She rolls her eyes, but offers me one of her warmer smiles. “Look. I’ll be straight. I was very pissed, because I knew. That we could have been—not perfect. No one fucking is. But decent. Anyway. You moved away, I moved away. You unfriended me, and fuck you for that. Did you ever know I got married, in the end?”

“You did?” She’d never once seemed the marrying type, but Jess nods.

“Christina. And hold on to your panties, but we even have kids.”

“Shit.”

She eyes me. “So much of that before you get them toilet trained.”

We share a laugh, and all of a sudden, it feels like this never ended, like this night never happened.

But it did.

“Hey,” she says, long, long minutes after we’ve both fallen silent. “I was happy, in the end. I never hated you—I mean, tonight, I do, but not really after.”

“Okay,” I say, then, “I’m sorry.”

She nods. “You said that, and I did believe it.”

“Yeah… but still.”

Jess nods. “Leaving now?”

I look up instead of down. There are just a few stars up in the sky bright enough to battle with the city’s light and win. I smile at the scarce parade of victors.

“Not quite yet.”

“You always were a stubborn bitch. I sort of like that about you. Another sip?”

She holds out her glass, but I make a face and shake my head.

“I should…” I vaguely motion at the door, and Jess nods.

I walk over, but just before I go through, Jess says, “Thanks for making me like matcha, by the way. I’d think of you, sometimes, when I made it for myself in the mornings.”

“You said it was way too bitter.”

Jess shrugs. “Don’t gloat.” And she blows me a kiss.

I had hoped. It was a party, after all, like a sixtieth or seventieth birthday, and it’s not something the special people in one’s life would want to miss.

But there is just a room. Light beige, chairs to the left and right, almost like the chapel we got married in, but not. It is not an altar up there. I should know. I picked the coffin, something in dark brown, some wood I can’t remember the name of just now.

We had to have the lid closed.

I stand there for a long, long time, wishing, suddenly and painfully, that Jess were here, but that would be so unfair. Who takes their ex to their husband’s funeral?

And the room is empty anyway, although the coffin has a presence. It has a weight and a depth that I feel could shift planets. I remember the first time I was here, sitting in the front row with ringing ears and thinking, as if on a loop, that everything had shifted, changed, come apart at the seams. The world and my place in it, my mind. But especially and above all else, my heart.

I walk up to the coffin, but it is not a normal kind of walk, not one that progresses and processes as these things should. It is like a thousand-thousand walks across a carpet designed to smother noisy shoes, like the journey of a lifetime crammed in every step.

I get there in the end, but I feel out of breath. I have felt out of breath for years, but your seventies will do that to you, just like tears will. I cannot decide which is which. I do not want to. A flash of memory brings me back to a penguin towel and a dark braid, and I wonder whether the bee is still struggling with death.

That poor beast, I think. Why can’t she accept it? All things must end, whether through the careless foot of a girl or the cruel bite of time. Or a bullet. Sometimes, a bullet is all it takes to make them tell you that you cannot have an open casket.

When I get there—and oh, I feel the weight of the journey—my eyes and lungs are on fire, and my hands are trembling. The lines and age spots seem like foreign bodies in an otherwise clear sky, but I cannot dwell on that.

There have been dreams over the years, dreams upon dreams like dead leaves on a wilting pile, of me opening this lid and taking one last look. When I saw Gran’s body, it wasn’t easy, but I knew. She was gone, and it was something I could come to terms with.

I push the lid open. It’s heavy. It takes effort.

In the casket, there are photographs. Or something else? We didn’t have pictures of all of these.

The first I spot is a younger Tim, eyes scanning spines at the public library. I recognize the scarf. He wore that the day I bumped into him, maybe two shelves down. There is another of a date, not the first one, a later one. I had unfriended Jess by that time. In the photograph, Tim’s face is outlined in soft illumination, and he has this smile. He’s listening to a story or other I’m telling him, his hands loosely folded around the stem of a wine glass.

With the warming softness of a summer breeze, a hand settles on my shoulder, and my ragged breathing finally evens out.

“That’s when I knew,” he says, and the photographs swims as my vision goes hazy with tears. “I knew that night, and I never regretted it, especially not at the end.”

His hand vanishes, and when I turn, the room is as empty as it was. I turn around and pick up the photograph. With one hand, I press the image of his smile to my heart, and as I walk toward the exit, I realize this is the memory I wanted, this smile. And his voice.

Oh, how I have missed his voice over the years.

It’s not the exit after all. It’s the kitchen again. Gran turns and fiddles with the radio, then points at the stove. “Check if it’s done.”

But I don’t have to. I can smell it, the warm spices, fresh parsley from the garden, carrots cooked to perfection.

“It’s done,” I say with the certainty of a final breath.

“Well, you know where the plates are, so don’t just stand there. Make me one, too.”

I do. It is awkward, carrying both over to her table without letting go of Tim’s picture, but I manage.

Gran, not caring about whether I’d mind or not, whisks the photo from my fingers just when I put down the plates.

“Hey!”

“Oooh! Who’s this then? Don’t you know it’s proper to introduce the man to your family first?”

“I did, but it was after you…”

She picks up her spoon. “Ah. Never mind then.” She spoons a mouthful of the stew into her mouth. “Was he good to you? Did you love him?”

She holds out the photo to me, and I take it back. “He was the best. I think we were made for each other. I don’t know. Sometimes I wondered whether I just thought that because we didn’t have that much time. Maybe if we had, I’d have come to resent him. Or he me.”

Gran, in an almost uncharacteristic way, blows a raspberry. “I didn’t raise a granddaughter anyone could resent.”

I smile at her. “I was so scared I’d be alone, you know. In the end.”

Gran reaches out a hand, places it over my own. I used to wonder at the roughness of her skin, but now, her skin feels like my skin. “We would never let you be alone. No one ever faces this alone, no one.”

It takes a long, long while before I can speak again. “Okay.” And after much, much longer still, “What happens now?”

“We eat,” Gran says.

We do. The taste is not just a taste, it is a memory. I have made this stew a thousand times, but I have never been able to remake it, to make it taste exactly like this, not once. It is childhood and pain, and healing. It’s summer spent outdoors, and snowy winters in the company of snowmen and the blackbirds in the yard. When I am done, I marvel at the pattern at the bottom of the deep plates. I see details through the small stains of stew I thought I’d forgotten years and years ago.

“That was good,” I say.

“It really was,” Gran says.

“And now?” I look at the photo of Tim again. That smile, oh, that smile. I hope he had a photo of me too. I did, of that very night, I hear a whisper on the air.

“I’ll do the dishes. You go on,” Gran says.

I nod and stand and cross the kitchen, but look back, one hand on the doorframe.

“It will be fine, child. Just another door,” Gran says, and before she collects, she fiddles with the radio behind her. Something cheery fills the air, and I smile as I watch her dance toward the sink, a plate in either hand.

I walk back to the front door. It is the right door. I know that with the same certainty as I knew Tim was mine, and mine for as long as… until the end.

“Just another door,” I say and pull it open and walk through.

Alexandra Seidel writes strange little stories while drinking a lot of coffee (too much, some say). Her writing has appeared in Future SF, Cossmass Infinities, and Fireside Magazine among others. You can follow her on Twitter @Alexa_Seidel or like her Facebook page www.facebook.com/AlexaSeidelWrites/, and find out what she’s up to at alexandraseidel.com. As Alexa Piper, she writes paranormal romance books which have been rumored to make people laugh out loud in public. Such rumors please this author.

Return to Issue #29 | Support The Deadlands

Karen asks: Without great expanses of space, do you think there will be less and less burying?

This sea change is already happening. Cremation rates have been rising steadily since the practice became widely accepted. According to the Cremation Association of North America’s 2021 report, US cremation rates rose from 40.8 percent to 56.1 percent over the past decade. Some countries have historically dealt with space issues by leasing graves, but in the US more and more families choose cremation.

I’ve previously discussed alkaline hydrolysis, aka aquamation, water cremation, green cremation, resomation, flameless cremation, and biocremation. Alkaline hydrolysis is an alternative to traditional cremation, and—as with any new practice in a conservative field—it’s been hailed as the future of environmentally responsible funeral options by some, while simultaneously being decried and viewed with extreme suspicion by more traditional groups.

Alkaline hydrolysis is not yet legal in Texas or Virginia, the two states in which I’m licensed. I was, therefore, very interested to find a class on alkaline hydrolysis available as a continuing education course when I recently renewed my Texas license. And not just available, but suggested as part of a package. I happily signed up, as it’s a subject I find more engaging than social security, vital statistics, or OSHA rights and regulations. (I’m very pro-OSHA rights and regulations, mind you, but that’s a topic I’ve devoted far more hours of my life to so far.)

Alkaline hydrolysis uses a mixture of 95% water and 5% sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, heated to approximately 300°F, to reduce human remains to softened bone and a sterile liquid called effluent, which is composed of amino acids, peptides, salts, sugars, and soaps. The bones are ground into powdery “ash” just as they are after flame cremation. The effluent can safely be disposed of via the sewage system, or used as fertilizer. (I don’t know how many alkaline hydrolysis facilities offer to return the liquid remains to families, but I’ve heard at least one story of someone watering their garden with Grandma.) I use the terms alkaline hydrolysis and water cremation interchangeably here, simply to spare myself the pain of repetition.

British scientist Amos Herbert Hobson first received a patent for his alkaline hydrolysis machine in 1888. Hobson used his machine for processing animal remains to separate glue and gelatin from bones, and create fertilizer. A century later, Dr. Gordon I. Kaye and Dr. Peter B. Weber of Albany Medical College turned to alkaline hydrolysis as a means of disposing the remains of animals that had been used in radioisotope experiments. (How is Revenge of the Radioactive Zombie Rabbits not a film yet?)

In 1994 Kaye and Weber patented the Modern Tissue Digester. (I admit, I’m glad that’s not one of the aliases alkaline hydrolysis goes by today.) The first human remains to be “digested” were medical research cadavers at UCLA and the University of Florida’s Shands Hospital. Crematories in the UK and the US began adopting the process in the 2000s. While the process is not yet legal for human remains in every state, it is legal for animals.

Water cremation uses significantly less energy than flame cremation, and produces less carbon dioxide and no mercury emissions or other toxic air emissions. It also neutralizes embalming chemicals, so a body can be traditionally embalmed for transportation or services and still safely undergo alkaline hydrolysis. (Yes, this bit of trivia did make my jackal ears perk straight up.)

Right now, water cremation may be more expensive than flame cremation where it’s offered. This is largely because the equipment is expensive and still harder to come by. States that have legalized the process may not have local facilities, and transportation costs will factor into the price of disposition. Water cremation also takes longer than flame cremation, which would prevent busy facilities from processing as many cases per day.

One cost that alkaline hydrolysis may eliminate is that of a casket, or “alternative container.” The latter refers to the cardboard box used for direct cremation. Crematories require a rigid, leakproof, covered container that is combustible. Even the cheapest possible option costs something. Alkaline hydrolysis places the decedent into a stainless steel wire basket, which allows the liquid to move through while holding the fragments in place. The body is wrapped in a degradable bioplastic bag, or a fabric shroud. I’m sure that as alkaline hydrolysis becomes more widely available, casket companies will begin offering bags and shrouds to keep up.

One of the little advantages of alkaline hydrolysis is that pacemakers and other medical devices don’t need to be removed beforehand. No combustion takes place, so the battery in a pacemaker or defibrillator—or, far more annoying, the battery in a pain pump in the decedent’s lower back—isn’t going to explode! Removing a pacemaker is normally a simple procedure, but requires a licensed embalmer. Sometimes it requires an embalmer to wade through a body bag full of maggots and decomp. Sometimes it requires an embalmer to roll a heavy person while trying to locate the pump in their back. Sometimes the family of the deceased isn’t sure whether or not their relative had a pacemaker, so we have to wand them down with a metal detector multiple times before the crematory operator decides it’s safe to proceed. After either water or flame cremation mechanical devices, along with other medical implants such as pins and screws, are removed from the remains and sent for recycling.

The course I took cites much of its information from the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), the organization which offers certification for crematory operators. CANA appears to have embraced the future of water cremation. They compare the process positively to both burial and flame cremation. The disadvantages listed focus mainly on logistics: limited legality/availability, the expense of the equipment, and the objections of religious groups or those who are reluctant to let go of tradition.

There is one data point, however, that they did not list as a disadvantage, but which I believe is worthy of note: “Typically, a body weighing 400 pounds or more cannot be accommodated in the water cremation cylinder. A shorter body with wider girth cannot be accommodated in the cylinder as easily as a taller body of equal weight with less width.”

With flame cremation, the most important factor with regards to the size of the deceased is simply: Will they fit through the retort door? It’s rare, but possible, that an extremely large body won’t fit and will need to be sent to a specialized facility. However, we’re talking a person weighing more than 800 lbs. in that scenario. I have personally not seen a person too large to be cremated, and I have helped prepare numerous decedents over 400 pounds.

Society levies a “fat tax” on large people in uncounted situations, but funeral services are by far one of the most pernicious. Caskets are expensive enough to begin with, and the price goes up with every two to three inches of extra width. An oversized casket may also require an oversized vault or grave liner from the cemetery. The cost of burying a very large person is exorbitant, and more than many families can afford. Cremation is usually preferred in these circumstances, so it’s important to let families know about that limitation where alkaline hydrolysis is concerned.

I’m very curious about alkaline hydrolysis, and look forward to witnessing the process. As options like human composting also become legal in some states, I dream of funeral gardens. Green cemeteries fed and watered with the dead, without the need for fertilizers, pesticides, or manicured lawns. An excellent rebuttal to the bland sterility of memorial gardens.

Have a question for our necromancer? You don\’t have to wait for a fog-shrouded night to drop it off.

Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.

Return to Issue 29 | Support The Deadlands

That last thing is what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing.
We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

What is to be said
                                  of the days when you feel nothing.
The blank of the paper tearing
                                                                  through your eyes.
                                    You float
a film of foam over sleep
                                          but never really get there
and then you’re awake                               again.
The dust of your room s p i l l i n g
out of the windowpane as dawn dips
its feet in. Your bones refusing
                                          to come together like words
on a page that resist meaning. The glass
and its shards s e t t l e d in your skin. You try
to gouge it out, but it’s so dry that it doesn’t
even bleed anymore.

                         This is what you gave up everything for.
Well, everything was gone already and this is your
justification
                    this place where the light doesn’t penetrate,
where words only mean something
when you have walked away from them.
The painting on the wall—its lush green moonlight,
                                   that you didn’t take down
when you rented this room, your mother
                     says it isn’t any good,
to let things l i n g e r like that
                                          in a place where they don’t belong anymore,
but it’s your life
and you’re waiting
                            for an eye to crawl out of its womb,
to speak the language of those
              who lived here before you for an eternity.
It’s a crevice
                                               that you can cling to;
The oblong wharf of ancient mahogany,
                     hovering
over the body of water
                                        like a dinner table,
for the formless whispers
of a forest haunted
                                     by the memory of those it’ll birth.
You swallow the black box
                  and drive to its edge
hitting the brakes is sacrilege
                                       and suddenly you’re in the lake, and you never learned
to swim. So you watch yourself
                                                               s i n k
in the green night. Algae eyes and watery lungs.
                 You go so far that the language bursts open.
Look god in the eye
and realize that there’s just one thing
                                                                         at the haunt of it all,

Abhinav is a graduate student residing in Delhi, India. His work has appeared in The Remnant Archive, Gulmohar Quarterly, and Tide Rises Literary Magazine among other forums.

Return to Issue 29 | Support The Deadlands

The laws concerning Jewish mourners (#587–590) are one of the thirty-four categories of mitzvot according to Rambam, aka Moses Maimonides, “a preeminent medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher, astronomer, and one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages” (Wikipedia, no shame).

There are 613 mitzvot in the Torah, the Jewish Bible. What is a mitzvah? Jews use the word mitzvah to mean a good deed or commandment. Not all general mitzvot are Biblical mitzvot, but all Biblical mitzvot are the good-deed type of mitzvot. The 587th mitzvah is “mourn for relatives.”

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba:
Congregation: Amein.

The summer of 2019 was the first time I mourned as a Jew. 

I came to Judaism over the course of a decade, starting in my teens and finally reaching my destination in my late 20s. Though I have lost many people close to me, all were prior to my official conversion.

That summer, my partner’s grandmother died. We were not related yet, neither by marriage nor by blood, but family means more than that. 

b’alma di-v’ra chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: “amein.”
[congregation: Amein.]

I got to know the woman only after the onset of dementia, but there was enough of her still present for us to form a connection and a bond. All of the grandparents I’d had were long gone, and I was close with only one. I don’t know why my partner’s grandmother reminded me of her—perhaps it was as shallow a resemblance as their shared sex and age, as well as the general form of the elderly, bent and shrunken.

Do we need a reason to love someone? I ask because I don’t know.

Congregation and mourner: Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya.

There is a great deal of halakah, or Jewish law, concerning death in Judaism. How to prepare the dead, how to bury the dead, how to mourn, what to do for others who are mourning, etc. I find comfort in these laws, as I know many other Jews do.  It’s good to have guidance during a time when it’s so easy to feel lost. I was already familiar with the laws, but knowing isn’t the same as doing.

I want to say we arrived late at night, unkempt and haggard, but no, that’s a lie. We left early in the morning, before dawn. I am not made for early mornings. It was late morning when we started the drive through D.C. traffic. I am barely made for mornings at all. 

We arrived unkempt, that much is true. Mourners are forbidden from doing things like showering, shaving, or wearing makeup or fresh clothing. If one must be unhygienic, there is some solace in being unhygienic in groups. 

It began to rain when we arrived at the gravesite. That’s where you really start getting in the mitzvot, when you get to the cemetery. There’s a bunch of things to do once you’re there:

• Halvayat ha’met (accompanying the dead [to the grave])
• Nihum avelim (comforting the mourners)
• Shoveling dirt into the grave
• Hesped (eulogizing the dead)
• reciting the Kaddish 

All of it qualifies as kevod ha’met showing respect for the dead. 

There are five different types of Kaddish, did you know that?

1. The Burial Kaddish
2. The Rabbi’s Kaddish (Kaddish DeRabbanan)
3. The Full Kaddish (Kaddish Shalem aka Kaddish Titkabel)
4. The Partial Kaddish (Chatzi Kaddish)
5. The Mourner’s Kaddish

But when people say the word “Kaddish,” they usually mean the one for mourners. When you “say Kaddish,” in the synagogue or at the gravesite or wherever, but always with a minyan (the number necessary for public worship)—that’s the Kaddish you’re saying.

Yitbarach v’yishtabach, v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam v’yitnaseh, v’yithadar v’yit’aleh v’yit’halal sh’mei d’kud’sha, b’rich hu,
[Congregation: b’rich hu.]

I stood. I could have sat, perhaps, in the front row, on the plastic folding chairs. But I didn’t feel I had the right to sit with the immediate family, so I stood off to the side. Barely under the tent cover that had been hastily constructed, as the rain came down harder and harder, the shower ever louder, forcing us to cut the eulogies short.

l’eila min-kol-birchata v’shirata, tushb’chata v’nechemata da’amiran b’alma, v’im’ru: “amein.”
[Congregation: Amein.]

Water is a classic symbol, often overwrought, but what can you do when the trope literally surrounds you, hits you in the face, and soaks your second-best clothes? It becomes far more difficult to ignore. Jews make heavy use of water-as-symbol, cleansing and rebirth. See: all handwashing, the mikveh (our ritual bath).

The men filled the grave with dirt. No shovels for women. I resented that strangers got the mitzvah, over her daughters and granddaughters, women who deserved to mourn in all the same ways men did. Men, strangers to her, soaked their suits and covered their trousers in mud as they moved the dirt. They didn’t deserve that mud, I thought. I resented that an accident of birth determined whether or not those same women counted later, at that night’s shiva (the first week of mourning following the death of a relative) service, when they were forbidden to speak and relegated to the back of the basement room. But then, I resent many of the ways Orthodox Judaism separates people based on the sex they’re assigned at birth. 

I thought I was beyond my bitterness, when I reached thirty. I am not.

Y’hei shlama raba min-sh’maya v’chayim aleinu v’al-kol-yisrael, v’im’ru: “amein.”
[Congregation: Amein.]

My first exposure to Kaddish was through literature. First, Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, which I liked very much, although it didn’t resonate with me the way it would years later in 2001, after I had lost a parent myself.
The next time I encountered the Kaddish, it was in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Belize, a nurse, calls his friend Louis to say the prayer for the very recently deceased Roy Cohn, whose AZT Belize just stole. When Louis objects (to the praying, not the stealing), Belize argues that the Kaddish asks for peace and forgiveness.

Louis isn’t sure about that, but he does it anyway. The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg helps him remember the words, reciting along with Louis. (As a young lawyer, Roy Cohn pushed for the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, charging them with being spies for the Soviets. Grand jury transcripts evidencing their guilt didn’t come out until after Angels in America had been published.) They end with “You sonofabitch.” The Kaddish does include a plea for peace, yes, at the end. The prayer does not, however, mention forgiveness.

Oseh shalom bim’romav hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yis’ra’eil 

I wonder if her children forgave her, my partner’s grandmother, the things she had done and said. Not just when they were children, but also as adults. I wonder if they forgave her at the grave, with the rain pouring down, or before she died, when it might have mattered a little more. Maybe they forgave her every day, with every new offense, a constant prayer on their lips as they adhered to Mitzvah #59, to honor father and mother, or at least #60, not to smite a father or mother, and 61, not to curse a father or mother. They try to be good Jews, I know, in their own ways. 

Maybe that is enough.

V’imru Amein.

MK Zvokel is a trans Jewish librarian living in Florida with two cats. Their most recent work can be found in Feral and eggplant tears. You can find them on instagram @mkzvokel.

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Avram Mordecai sits shiva for his dead sister Tamar with only Tamar herself in attendance.

The memorial yahrzeit candle of remembrance burns auburn, lurid shadows waltzing upon Tamar’s face. Avram sits on a mourner’s seat, but the only meals laid out for him are horror and self-contempt. Tamar sits across from him, watching him endlessly.

Shiva is meant to be held for seven days, with the Mourner’s Kaddish for the deceased spoken thrice a day. Avram has not managed to say the prayer for Tamar even once. He tries to forgive himself, but the sight before him blocks his attempts.

His sister remains as he last saw her, with straight black hair, dark skin, and sundered skull. Her smile is hollow, her eyes windows to a vacant house. The wound in her head is dark as wine. The edges of her white skirt drip with tendrils of red that vanish like dew against the cream curls of the carpet.

The candle burns in memory, bright as her soul in life. But memory is meant for the departed, and Tamar refuses to depart. She clings to him, a knot that cannot be severed; gazing upon his haggard face and reddened eyes. No mourners come to this cramped, cheap Virginia apartment, nobody remembers another broken body in an alleyway. Hate crime or pogrom, no matter what the era, this world refuses to offer its compassion to dead Jews. All they had was one another, and now he has naught but himself and her ghost.

On the first day, he was alone, wishing nothing but hate upon the world. Avram could only think of the call that told him that his world had ended in that small hospital, with a too-small bed and white pillows soaked black in dull lamplight. 

He hid in their apartment all through the riot, too afraid to leave and face a reality where the demons in his mind were made flesh and blood. Avram’s world extends to the front door, for the world outside is vast and brutal. Both he and his sister have been hurt in the past, Avram still bearing the scars over his arms. Only Tamar has the courage to set foot in the world outside.

Had, he reminds himself, just as she smiles at him again with a hollow and broken grin, a sunken expression that brings him fear as well as despair.

“What do you want?” he asks her, not for the first time.

The ghost refuses to stop staring at him. Her presence is a coiled snake of ice in his heart, letting him feel every gelid instant of her. She arrived on the second night of shiva, taking a place in the mourners’ bench as though agonizing over her own demise.

It is now the fifth night of shiva. His clothes are soaked with sweat, his face thick with stubble. He watches her, then the candle, wondering how it can reflect her soul with such intense and renewed heat when that soul radiates a frigid cold.

He sits as he has for five days, the candle burning without end despite that he has not relighted it once. “What do you want?”

His voice comes out in a hoarse plea, dry from repetition. Through a swimming haze of tears and regret, he tries to mouth an apology in English or Hebrew, to offer repentance, teshuvah, so he might achieve absolution.

He did not protect her, his sister. He failed, as legions of Jews throughout history failed to protect loved ones. 

“You look afraid,” she says in a chill breeze, her voice the tender brush of wind over the gravestone where her body now lies. She extends a hand, the fingers a velvet brush of ice as it touches his cheek. “You know what I am.”

It is the first time she has spoken since her unnatural arrival days before. Her tone is a skeletal remnant of her strong voice in life. He cringes from her voice, all but drowning in terror at the proclamation. Pain lances through him at her words. He does know what she has become, recalls it from the tales of childhood stories.

Dybbuk. The restless dead called forth from the sunless lands, returned for their unfinished business to find purchase in living vessels. He is her suit, her home, her harbor, with only her condemning smile fixed on her face.

The lights are off. Darkness reigns outside. He has scarcely moved in days. He barely remembers to take enough water to keep himself alive. All this while the ghost sits and stares, a bleeding memory of failure. “Are you sure I’m the one who’s dead here, Avvy?” The soft whisper of her voice is tender, soft snow packed into his brain.

He pulls himself up, finding some secret strength inside himself.  He turns, trying to flee, for the sound of her voice coupled with those words terrify him so much more than the mere sight of her. He rushes for the door, nothing keeping him bound in the room.

Only the fog in his brain, the demons in his mind, and the rattling, shivering tremor of his bones stop him when he stretches forth a shaking hand for the brass handle of the apartment door.

To flee will be to enter the world, to see people staring at him, their eyes needles of judgment. To flee is to enter a world that will persecute him, judge him for his heritage. He envisions the mob, their torches brighter than any candle. They will come for him, he thinks. His mind snarls invectives that drive spikes of doubt through his feet. 

Better to stay with ghosts. At least the terror with them is known. Head slumped, shoulders squared, he attempts a prayer in Hebrew for benevolence from a God whose mercy has never extended to the plight of the Tribe. People of the Book, divested of a homeland thousands of years ago and driven all through the world.

He turns from the door, that portal to persecution. He shuffles to return to the living room, feet plodding upon the pale carpet. The only other sounds are the buzzing crackle of the wick and the drip of ethereal blood.

Her grin is ephemeral, insubstantial by flickering candlelight. “Avvy.” She rasps it gently. “Did you try to go out?” Her head cocks, her body moving as if through water. From her leaning head, a splattering of pale red falls to the floor, vanishing like dissolving dewdrops in morning heat. “Why would you try to leave?”

To go, he thinks. To run, to flee. “To get away from you.”

An admission. Honesty at last. If the Dybbuk is displeased, she gives no sign, though her tongue clicks, rattling off her teeth like pebbles bouncing against rocks. “Do you think you can?”

He has no idea. 

“Do you even want to?”

His mind roils, a stew of anxiety, just one more fearful Jew. He is a punchline to the world, with the collective trauma of thousands of years to cage him. He lives separate and apart, with only Tamar to help him.

The candlelight dims, as though the flame has reached the end of its trail upon the wick. The glow of the fire is eclipsed by Tamar. “You stopped,” she says in a flat monotone, eschewing emotion or condemnation. In life, Tamar always attempted to push him beyond his shell with infinite patience. 

“I can’t.” He manages only a frog’s croak, a lamentation of his own weakness. Tears flee Avram’s eyes and roll down his cheeks as the Dybbuk continues to watch him. “Nobody’s here,” he mutters while he runs hands against his arms, rubbing firmly as though the friction might banish the spectral cold.

Tamar’s form burns bright despite the weak candlelight, a lucent, argent glow emanating from her like the moon has taken his sister’s shape. “Why not?”

“Because nobody cares. Not about us.” Avram falls back into the mourner’s seat, the apartment his entire world and yet a cramped coffin all at once. There are only a few rooms, Avram’s bedroom so near to Tamar’s now-empty one. Her things sit unmolested and unmarred, exactly where she left them, from her computer to the stuffed animals that were mementos of a happier childhood.

Their parents are long gone, Tamar’s life insurance all that keeps Avram from destitution and ruin. Avram has nothing but the computer and meager skills to compensate for his strong sister. 

The news reported the crime was without motive, meaningless and without further investigation required. The man who struck Tamar blends faceless and wordless with a thousand others, Avram conjuring his face a million times in his sleep. The news has already moved on, Tamar a forgotten footnote three clicks away from the front page. 

If they are very lucky, it will read “Tamar Mordecai,” with the proclamation she was Jewish. It should be important. It should matter. 

She died for it.

“Nobody cares about us at all, Tamar.”

“That’s not true.” Tamar’s rattling voice escapes her throat. She watches him as she has, unceasingly, just as she watched over him in life. She makes no move to harm him, nor to comfort him. “I always cared. It hurts me to see you like this.”

“I’m sitting shiva. Shouldn’t I be mourning?” He slumps back in the seat, his head caressed by the soft cushion behind him. Avram shuts his eyes, the tears stinging at his lashes. “I have to. Nobody else will for you.”

“Who says I need them to?” Tamar asks, as though it is the most natural thing in the world for the dead to ask. Another dead Jew, that’s all Tamar will be in a week, banished to the infinite recesses of the forgotten for everyone except Avram. Only he will remember her warm, encouraging smiles, her laughter as she spun the dreidel on Hanukkah or baked fresh babka on Rosh Hashanah. And yet she sits there, her words selfless. “Do you understand what the shiva is for, Avvy?”

He does not respond, his hands roaming against old scars on his arm as fear overwhelms him again. Not fear of the world, but fear of the answers. “To remember the dead.”

“The living are the ones who remember the dead,” the ghost returns. “Sitting shiva is for the living, Avvy. But living isn’t what you’re doing. That won’t end when the seventh day does.” Her hands fold delicately in her lap, her motions dreamlike, though she passes her limbs through ethereal liquid. “I need you to change that.”

He lives, breathes, and eats. He works sometimes, for what part-time work he can do from the sanctity of the computer. He ensconces himself in safety, where slings and arrows cannot harm him. There is nobody to assault him again, strike him again, spit on him and call him derisive names. 

“I worry about you, Avvy,” the Dybbuk says. Her eyes are empty pools of ice, staring unceasingly into him. “What will you do without me now?”

The answer is obvious. He will exist, in a fugue state, passing aimlessly through the dance of life until Hashem claims him. Avram will bow his head on Friday nights and murmur the prayers of Shabbat. He will light the candles then, until the candles are all gone and he must go for more. 

“You’ve neglected your looks.”

“It’s shiva. I’m supposed to.” The barest ember of sardonic mirth lights Avram’s face, bringing an identical expression to Tamar.

“We both know that won’t change when shiva ends.” Tamar admonishes him in the same manner she’d use to hurry him along for Sukkot dinner. The Dybbuk rises from her seat. “What can I do for you?”

“Come back to life.” That’s it, all he can think of. There is no other option that could heal the hole in his heart. He cannot remember the last thing spoken between them, the words that would be their sign of parting in this life. Nor does he recall what she shouted to him before the closing door took her from the apartment and from Avram’s life.

“Not on the menu, Avvy. The dead are the dead.” Concern drips into her voice. “Why are you so broken by it?”

“You’re my sister,” he answers. You always know what to do, he thinks. She is the younger, yet she takes care of him without regret or resentment. She always enjoyed sharing cups of wine on Shabbat and encouraging him to sit outside with her on the front steps to stare at the stars together.

 But now her loving eyes are hollowed, narrow as she stands before him. “Don’t use me as an excuse,” she snarls. Avram sinks into his seat, ashamed. Tamar’s brief fury ends as soon as it begins.

“Everyone has it out for us, Tamar,” Avram whispers. “Isn’t that what you said? Every time, someone rises up to destroy us.”

“I think you forgot the point of that saying. We’re still here.” 

Avram looks at the window, his portal to the outside world. It is pitch black outside, without any moon. He can already see the torches, hear the thundering footfalls against the ground, hear the enraged curses of the mobs. They’ll say the Jews will not replace them when they attack him, just as they did for his sister.

Tamar’s hands burn as ice on his shoulders. “We’re all still here. All around you if you let yourself see it. We’re little cinders of a fire that connect and burn all the brighter. Do you need mourners, Avvy? Look around you.”

Avram finds the strength to turn back to the room. He sees all of them bleeding through the walls, spectral figures as insubstantial as Tamar. He knows none of them. Not the men, nor the women, nor the children. There are so many he does not understand how they can fit in this room, this spectral parade of mourners. Their flesh is translucent, their eyes sunken pits, many bearing the signs of the world’s teeth upon them; dripping wounds that weep like sores.

Each and every one of them bears a smile tinged with sadness. They gather around Avram, alone in his seat. They crowd about awkwardly, for Avram had expected no guests and had prepared accordingly. They gather near Tamar, who leads them, conducting them like a phantom orchestra. They gesture to the table, though Avram finds no food there. The only banquet laid out is one of feeling.

Their emotions well up through the cold in him, as they cling to his very soul. He feels like drowning in the icy tide, but the feelings they offer are charity, support, kindness. 

Community. A people. All of them Jews.

Though the dead weep and cry, Avram understands before Tamar says it. “They’re not my mourners, Avvy. They’re yours. The living mourn the dead. Should it not follow that the dead must mourn the living?” 

Avram looks into each hollow eye, sees each gaping wound. He takes in the faces of ghosts who still wear the clothing of twenty-first century modernity, looks upon those in fashions he does not recognize. He sees his people, spirits of past times. There are those who resemble him and Tamar, reminders of family who gaze upon him with love and support. Each is a Jew whose life was torn from them prematurely.

But he is here. 

Avram remains. 

Just as so many others do, part of a great whole, even though they were scattered. They are a people even so. They gather around, not caring of their appearances, for it is shiva. They do not look at the mirrors, for they are covered. They offer their feast in Avram’s memory, of all he could have been.

But not what he could be. He takes them all in, a living ghost to stare at dead ones. His hands tremble at his sides. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay,” Tamar says. “You will. You’ll do your best. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll hurt. But you’ll also go on.

“You’ll live. Stop being dead, Avvy. For both of us.”

Avram cannot be sure he can, but her expression remains patient as ever. He finds himself focusing on it, not the wound at her head. She is again Tamar, the patient and caring sister, surrounded by community. “I should have been there for you, Tamar.”

“I’m not blaming you. Stop blaming yourself.”

“It’s terrifying out there.” 

“It’s frightening. It’s uncertain. But that’s life.”

He sits there with her, two mourners on the same couch, surrounded by their congregation. “You say it,” Tamar says. “Say the words for me or I’ll have to say it for you. Please don’t make me do that.”

He knows what she means. One of them must speak the Kaddish for the other. He has not yet managed to because to say it will mean to acknowledge that she is gone, relegated to the past forever. But he knows she is right. Avram knows what he must accept.

He begins. “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chir’utei.”

Avram speaks the traditional prayer for the departed. He says it flawlessly. The cold in him subsides, and the sun rises outside. The candle burns down to a wick at last.

He finishes the final word. “Amen.”

He sees her smile just one last time in the light of the shiva’s final day. The other ghosts are gone, fading to insubstantial traces and then not even that. Tears fill his eyes as he blinks them, trying to hold to that final image of love. 

One blink clears his eyes. He sits alone when he opens them. There are no more dead in his home. Least of all himself. There is pain, but also honesty. He takes shuddering breaths, weeping at the newfound warmth and loss, permitting himself the sorrow. It takes a long time.

But he rises and uncovers the mirror, to stare at a resolute stranger with reddened eyes and an unshaven face. He looks at his scars and then outside, envisioning everything without. Avram could retreat and cover the mirror again, maybe even go back to his room.

But the shiva stands completed, for the living and the dead. Avram brushes his hand over his face. He is not sure he can do everything he should. But like their people, he will try. Life stretches out ahead, with all its uncertainties and pains.

Striding through a room once filled with ghosts, he prepares himself. Avram walks to the door.

He reaches for the brass handle.

Avram Mordecai hopes he no longer haunts the dead, for he feels back among the living.

Avram, now clean-shaven and well-groomed, sits behind the wheel of his car, having left work early on a singular purpose. Food and drink occupy the passenger seat, the eternal Jewish answer to any dilemma. A dark house awaits him, the window catching the flickering light of what he knows is a yahrzeit candle.

Someone needs him, and so he has come.

Avram recognizes fellow parishioners from synagogue and coworkers from the office. Not all of them are Jews. Richard Silver lifts a hand in greeting, smiling gratefully as Avram exits the car.

“You made it.” There is gratitude, but no surprise in Richard’s voice. All know that Avram fulfills a special role in their community.

“How is Benjamin?” Avram turns his gaze to the dancing light of the yahrzeit candle. He knows the tableau of grief he will find when that door opens. He has seen it many times after living it himself.

“I don’t think he’s holding up well,” Richard admits. Avram reads concern in the faces of all present, seeing them look to him for guidance, graciously greeting everyone he sees, taking a deep, brave breath. “I know he’ll appreciate seeing you.”

“Not just me. Everyone,” Avram corrects, looking to the face of each person who cared enough to come to pay respects while reminding himself to breathe steadily beneath the open sky. Being outside is still difficult sometimes. Unfamiliar sounds startle him and tighten a hard fist in his stomach. His therapist says it is an expected sign of trauma, and Avram privately doubts it will ever leave him. “When you’re hurting, it’s good to know that people care.”

One by one, they greet him with embraces. “Bless you, Avram,” one woman says. “Benjamin’s hurting so much. I know this will mean the world to him.”

“It’s nothing you all didn’t do for me.” Two years ago, Avram stumbled to the local shul, the Rabbi introducing him to Richard and the others. They saw a nervous man trying so hard to live and gave him something he needed: his people. Richard and Benjamin helped him get a job to save money for school again. He and the others invited him to holidays and Shabbos dinner. “Benjamin said Kaddish for Tamar in synagogue. How could I call myself his friend if I wasn’t here now?”

Just as he always does before facing the grief of another, Avram takes a picture from his wallet and gazes upon the immortalized image of Tamar. The image in the photo is how he wants to remember his sister; not bleeding in her hospital bed, not a grinning shade still bearing a mortal wound. In this picture, Tamar smiles with radiance and life, her hair free and unbound. All the joy of a life ahead is reflected within her eyes.

“Grief,” Avram says, looking at that photo, “is something nobody should bear alone.” Tamar and his people taught him that. Now he carries it forward with him, doing his best to help others live in turn.

Sometimes, his own eyes fill with tears when he looks at her image, because it is a reminder she is gone. But is also the proof she lived, that she dreamed and hoped. Looking at her is an affirmation that the feeling she brought into his life will never fade. Without her final push, he might never have realized that.

Seeing her still brings soft splinters of pain and doubt sometimes. But most often she gives him comfort and drive. Avram believes himself weak in many ways, flawed and uncertain. But he is alive, and that means walking through the obscurity of the future. He has Tamar to remind him of that. Not just a picture, but a lifetime of memories. He walks forward as best he can, as their people have always done.

He salves the wound with the memory of his forebears’ faith in him. Dead or alive, they are a people. They are there for one another, just as Tamar was for him. In the corner of the picture is a phrase in Hebrew. L’chaim.

To life.

He will show his future children this picture and tell them of an aunt who never stopped living even when it seemed the world was against them. Who took Avram from the realm of the dead and restored him to life in that spectral shiva.

He puts the photo away, for that is his own grief and he must now focus on another’s. He and Richard retrieve the food Avram has brought: fresh challah bread and black-and-white cookies from the bakery, along with good, rich wine. Avram turns to the others and beckons them on to follow him.

“Are there any questions? I know for some of you, it’s your first shiva. I’ve known a few myself, so I can try to answer anything you have on your mind.”

Some of them ponder a moment. Kelly Hsu is the first to voice the obvious query: “You think Ben will be okay?”

Avram considers it, thinking of Tamar and the last smile of love she took with her into the realm of the dead. “Eventually,” he says honestly. “The important thing is we’re here for him now.” They all hold food, cards of condolences. Little things that mean so much. “That’s what shiva is for,” Avram adds. “For the living.” No, that’s not quite it.

“Because mourning is a part of death and life together. It’s to remind them to live after it’s done.” A rabbi might have another answer. Two Jews, three opinions, so the saying goes. But this is his answer. And he finds it a good one.

Avram leads them to Benjamin’s door, reaching out to take the brass handle in hand. Unlocked, it swings open with a creak. The first thing he feels is the same cold from two years ago, the frigid chill of death. Benjamin Kaplan is inside, reclining on the couch. Unshaven, tracks of tears marking his face and a picture clasped in his hands. His head is turned to the side, as though he is watching someone else on the couch.

A yahrzeit candle flickers in the darkness, resting on the windowsill near Benjamin. Though the flame is bright, no wax runs down the sides, the wick still pale white without a touch of blackening.

Avram holds up a hand to pause the others. “Give us just a few minutes,” he says. It is not the first time he’s seen this. He will ensure that Benjamin does not endure this alone. Avram walks inside to join another shiva, to say Kaddish and make sure the departed’s memory, as the Jews say, is a blessing. He sits on the couch, noting Ben tensing just slightly, his gaze a hair to Avram’s right. Avram shifts on the wide couch, leaving space for both man and Dybbuk until one is laid to rest and the other has a new beginning ahead.

Avram prepares to help another face his ghosts and then lead a community in sitting shiva.

Ensuring the dead will not mourn the living.

Dedicated to Harvey Lehner, who loved his family and his people. May your memory always be a blessing, Grandpa.

Zach Rosenberg is a Jewish horror and SFF writer living in Florida. By night, he crafts frightening and fantastical tales. By day, he practices law, which is even scarier. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications such as Dark Matter Magazine, Seize the Press, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His first book Hungers As Old As This Land was released by Brigids Gate and his second, The Long Shalom is out from Off-Limits Press. Find him on twitter at @ZachRoseWriter.

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Don’t be afraid to weave your truth
into a duvet. Sing your demon a lullaby,

let it sleep. Give existence a name, a lucid flame
you wear without fear on your flesh—peel

your lips, and tell me how freely you allowed
yourself to taste life. Shapeshift.

Remember to thrust your hand
into the depth of your soul. Watch yourself burn

little by little, into a stump. For we pass from silence
into knowing the face of God. There you will

throw a fist in the air or pass your saucer of agonies.
Take, my aches, feed, lap up my pain, unbridled,

overflowing its brook. What is love but a body looking
for death in a flower face, a lace of music. Body

aflame, madly hungry for a bowl of puffer fish.
How many decades have you burned searching the depth

of your being for that which is so near, yet abandoned?
Don’t be afraid of dying, of yielding yourself, purple

deer on love’s altar, watching fragments
of you fall off, slowly, magic rain.

Damilola Omotoyinbo, Frontier XIX, is a Nigerian Creative Writer. A Fellow of the Ebedi International Writers’ Residency. Damilola won the 2021 SprinNG contest, got the Lolwe Classes Scholarship, and was longlisted for the 2022 African Writers Awards and the Writing Ukraine Prize. She has work published or forthcoming in Ake Review, New Feathers Anthology, Olongo Africa, The South Shore Review, The Deadlands, Brittle paper, Agbowó, Pepper Coast Lit, Afritondo, AHC, Better Than Starbucks, TSTR, Nigerian Tribune Newspaper and elsewhere. Damilola studied Biochemistry. Her happy places are; Pinterest, YouTube and the church. She tweets @_Damilola_O.

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