Between Last Breaths by Jennifer Autumn Li

A broken echo screeches beside you, and lifts the veil above. It has been sedated, held back by your father’s urgency, his words filling the gaps in between. You are at a wake, standing in a drunken stillness with legs surrounding where you are. Bodies are dressed in black, but they are headless, non-faced creatures grieving and breathing. You had a brightness, didn’t you, a willingness to fix your aim and throw a dart, a consistency in believing, gripping to the pen that signed your future into cursive letters, bold and elegant and printed. Your life, handpicked. Your ego is an addict, its mouth is salivating with shame, shame that you need the words of another’s lips in order to feel upright, steady, gracefully tall and that craving is persistent, like expensive taste. You are not alone. Hundreds walk with you, casting off their vision and surrendering their will to motion, relinquishing choice for action, binging in approval, soffocating under maks. Who is being cremated, lost to the fire? You have forgotten, waiting in the fog, the abyss, the ceremonial departing. You step in, closer, towards the coffin, and you find, beneath the smoke of dreams— a woman with eyes carved out by nails, a noose caressing her neck like a scarf, and her starved, pale-faced shedding of skin, You.