The Obituary Writer
by Joe Kapitan
(after Victoria Chang)
I. The obituary writer has writer’s block. No one has died today, she thinks. No, that’s impossible. Instead: no one died well today. Instead: today died unwell. She consults a list of writing prompts. Pretend that you’ve turned into an animal, reads the first. The obituary writer becomes a magpie. She flies to her nest high in the leaning spruce. Her shiny treasures await her inspection. The magpie has writer’s block. These scraps are worthless, she thinks. Instead: these scraps are the detritus of better things. Instead: these scraps are the voices of silenced things. What will your nest say about you, magpie, in your absence? The magpie arranges the scraps into sentences, like a riddle, like a map of self. There is a word for this act, but the magpie cannot recall it.
II. The obituary writer is contacted by the charity that buries the indigent. Please write an obituary for this homeless man, they ask. They pay well due to lack of source material. They think his name was Carl, but don’t quote us, they say. The obituary writer’s white screen is an empty canvas, so how to paint him? Carl (?) loved life so hard and so deeply, she writes, that he emptied himself for others. Carl didn’t eat so that you could eat. Carl didn’t work so that your child could have his job. Carl claimed no space for himself, squeezing his body into the cracks no one else wanted, a ledge of cold concrete beneath the interstate overpass. The obituary writer does not expect her work to go viral. The charity does not expect hundreds of strangers to show up at the cemetery. We wish we could have known Carl, they all say. You drove over him every day, the obituary writer answers.
The obituary writer wins a prize for her piece, “Carl (?) (No Last Name)”. She is invited to an awards banquet but does not attend. Instead, she finds the gap in the chain link fence along the interstate and climbs down beneath the overpass, to find the ledge, to see if she got anything right.
III. At a party, a drunk man asks the obituary writer the question she hates most: have you written your own obituary? The guests quiet, awaiting her answer. Does no one understand that this is not possible? She tried once, out of arrogance, as if anyone cared to hear an artist explain their brush strokes. A message is always defined by its receiver. A mighty star at the far edge of the universe flares its immense light in our direction, and yet all we see is a fading flicker, its spent source already centuries cold. No, she decides, the subject can never describe itself as object. Instead: the subject cannot object to anyone else’s description of it. Instead: the subject is subjective. Better to have our actions read like tea leaves, our lairs excavated for clues.
You don’t know me, the obituary writer says to the drunk man, and no one takes it as the answer to his question
Joe Kapitan's recent short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in DIAGRAM, Spry, Pithead Chapel, New World Writing, and X-R-A-Y. He is author of a short story collection, CAVES OF THE RUST BELT (Tortoise Books), and is a staff CNF reader for Atticus Review.
