my fear of death ten years later

BELLA AGARWAL DESERT MOUNTAIN HIGH SCHOOL

age 5, child.

afraid of the dark, afraid of what creatures lurk in the damp air.

in the midst of the night, hurricane spills in through cracked windows, rain clouds are ebony skid marks on the sky. beady eyes narrow in on me, i become a silvery fish swimming in ink, reckless pawn on the chess board. even the marrow in my bones can see Death in this air, She is made of embers and sunken cheeks, a hollow face but ever-hungry stomach.

Her scythe guts me, cherry pits spill from my gaping wound, my fish skeleton on full display, an ashy willow tree with bones for branches, gnarled and twisted. i am all puckered lips and gills, my scales become scattered on the floor, fishhook falling out of my mouth, i was naive enough to take the bait and enter the darkness. i am dead-alive like i was in my mother’s womb, it brings back memories i do not have. i see Her face, Death with tight skin and pearly teeth, Her metal corset and swirling skirts ablaze. with a blow She sends me back to where i came from and i cower underneath my mattress, i become the monster under my bed.

afraid of the gun, afraid of the barrel and the trigger and the body. i see it every night in my dreams.

i sit in AP Biology, facts about the Porifera phylum cascade from my teacher’s lips. creatures with no mouths, empty shelless sponges sucking in food through pores, never talking, never moving. the ink from my pen begins to bleed into the next page, then the next and the next and my hands refuse to keep writing. his mouth is now full of words about the phylum Chordata, vertebrates with tails and slits and strands of nerves. fish, he tells us. an example of the animals in the phylum is fish.

then the boy with the gun bursts through the door and we all take on the form of fish, we are all tangled nerves and puckered lips. i stare Death in the face again, She is in the form of the assault rifle in the boy’s hands, Her fingers interlaced with his, waiting on the trigger. Death is dancing with him, She is waltzing with all of us. Death has become machine, Her plump belly swelling with each life she plucks, leaving behind bodies riddled with holes.

a bullet through the girl in front of me, the girl who was saturated with life just seconds before. her bones disintegrate and her head flops onto my desk. i am never the first to die. two bullets in my neck like gills. this classroom is a pomegranate, rosy and ripe for the taking. i can see him shooting the fruit until it splits cleanly into two halves, he rolls each seed in his calloused fingertips before shoving it into his mouth,

the meat wets his throat and he spits our skeletons back onto the floor, the loose thread on his jeans red with juice. another bullet cuts through my play-dough head and emerges from the other side. i exit this world too young, my mother’s umbilical cord still wrapped around my neck, bruising my soft skin as i become just another tombstone in a cemetary of innocents.

our deaths speak volumes but no one ever listens to the screams of dead children. we become the Porifera, no mouths, no movement. the living scream too, the amount of their lips multiply exponentially with every attack by Death, but nothing ever changes, the law never changes. the bodies keep coming and coming and the chants get louder and louder until the night finally ends, only for the nightmare to return as soon as the sun sets once more.

every time the one holding the gun mutates into someone else, different genders, races, hands, eyes, noses, lips, tongues.

the people change but the gun always stays the same.