The Neural Level

When the smoke settles, I greet my elders. Their faces are a field of moths. All this time, I expected death to be a housewarming. Maybe grandma holds a melon cake, the candles flaring. Maybe the door swings open, and the karaoke seeps out. Maybe laughter. Instead I witness wings bristling, white hair, land waiting to erode to familiar. So I reset the stage. I open myself up to strangers. The years boil over and I lick the spillage, remembering how it feels to hunger. It begins again. I greet my elders. Their faces, a field. They hand me box, I know it contains my name, an incantation of the mothers before me, a word I never learned because I never bothered to ask. The box opens, a girl walks out. And because I remember her or I love her or I fear her, I kiss her. The tang of saltwater. She reenters the box, the shape of her body now choked with moths. I step through them, and they become a table. A mother walks out with a pot of tomato soup, a father with his newspaper. Their daughter sits down, counts backward from six. As the numbers fade to noise, I look down at my plate, empty.