51. Cheesecakes
Fiction. All starting with the dragon fruit. Now look how it’d evolved. They say history is lies made truth by victors. What does the vanquished do? The vanquished stay dead behind the scene like a toxic shadow polluting the conscience of society. That’s Jimmy’s theory.
While flesh and blood, on the run after turning dad into a masterpiece, he’d explained that our senses still operate after the last breath, but in a degenerative order linear with decay. So yes, I could see how the paramedics shook their heads in disbelief, how the coroner chuckled and pronounced us dead, how the undertaker cursed at the stingy church members haggling over the cost of my (and Jimmy’s) funeral, and how the sick mortician tried a threesome with cooked conjoined corpses.
Of course as tissue turns to dust, things get fuzzy and confused. The acrid smell of roasted flesh and rot mixes to piercing disinfectant and sanitizers. Jimmy sounding and looking like my dad, even tasting the same, as if I were making love to the same man...the same man after all this while. And fire feels like sharp freezing water, two ends of a spectrum of the same baptism.
They didn’t provide us with a coffin; couldn’t find one that fit, had to custom make. Church said no! Too expensive, will not budget it in for me... because of Jimmy. Better ways to spend hard earned tithe-money. Option two is to saw us in two. But they won’t know who is who. Worse, it would be impossible to tell charcoaled leg from hand, frizzled head from ass. Also, extra cash involved for this additional service. Easiest solution then to this predicament: crudely mummify and toss us into oven.
Crackling bones and shrivelling flesh, so here I am at the end of my journey, the beginning of destiny, collected in a discounted urn and about to be released to the wind. The real world drifts by, not caressing me, not harassing me. And my bad memories, they’re now just a dream belonging to somebody else’s nightmare.
Ashes mingle, Jimmy and me, our particles breed, dust molecules commune. I don’t know what to expect, what to do. But Jimmy says, don’t worry, just see what I see.
So, as the cap is undone and the urn upturned, our powdered remains gasped on a final rollercoaster ride; gushed off suddenly by a rising gust, separated, but never erased is our love to finally sleep deep in the ocean’s bed.
In the humming air I scramble for one last thought, one last souvenir of Earth I will carry with me always. The purple blood of the dragon fruit, I don’t know why it came to mind, but after RZ’s done resurrecting those damned creatures, and they’d flown off from the land of imagination, I will open the fridge, and certain no one stands behind, feast on cheesecakes forever in time.