Holly Day

Holly Day

Remainders

When you die, I will unfurl your skin from your body as if you were an apple or a pheasant, carefully cut your tattoos from your flayed skin for future preservation. When you die, I will carefully package your organs for their various destinations, send them off like Christmas presents to waiting hosts around the world. When you die, I will make sure every drop of blood finds its way into a labeled plastic sack, I will make sure your bones are cleaned and dried and varnished for preservation. Everything has its place. Nothing will be wasted.

There are instructions left for my own body, too—I will not abide horse-drawn processions, a parade of black cars gloomy-faced children in ill-fitting church clothes a solemn ceremony involving too many dead flowers a noisy mechanism lowering my casket into the ground. I would rather have bits of me scattered into the sea like popcorn for seagulls rolled off the back of a rickety old truck for lions to fight over propped up in a shooting range to test the damage caused by various bullet calibers dragged off into the bushes by feral dogs or ambitious raccoons.