The sun slowly drifts across the smooth water. Fishermen with faces flushed by the wind have already returned to shore. Their nets are bursting with fish. They pick out the smaller ones and throw them to the dozen assorted cats waiting on the pier for their supper. Far above the coast, the giant figure of a stirring Mount Etna pulsates with fire and smoke. Check out the skeleton’s peculiar quivering fingers. They’re waving hello. They’re writing you postcards from our city. Well, howdy Mari! How are you these days? Do you want me to tell you about how dreadful death can be? The soul, reason, art, faith, kindness—death hacks up gobbets of bloody pus at them from her rattling lungs, waving away stubborn religious devotion with her bony hand. With humiliating ease, she snuffs out everything arrayed against her. Ha! Go ahead and tell the dying soldier as he lies there, choking on his own blood, looking at the ribs torn from his abdomen, that he will live on in the memory of his descendants, while his remains all the while putrefy in the grave. What will he say to that? Fuck you, death. Go ahead and tell the pneumonia patient about the immortal soul as they convulsively try to suck air into inflamed lungs, unable to breathe in the oxygen. Tell the cancer patient about divine justice. Show me Buddha, candles in hand, dancing above our unsuspecting heads, show me the saints looking over us from the clouds like we were their flock, show me the holy mountains, the cross, the totems, all the piles of sacred shit that people pray to. Show me anything that might save us from death. We can never be ready to meet her. We cling to life. Cling like a headless toad sliding off its pin on the dissection table. When death beckons, where are all our lofty thoughts of beauty, honour, courage . . . Forget that. Where is our basic human dignity even? Gone. Even a cat knows to wander off to some quiet corner and die with dignity. But human beings, they stick around to burden people around them with their senseless agony, dragging out their existence. Dignity in the face of death. Not for people.

Look at the man suffocating in the moonlit room, obstinately shaking his head and struggling. Where did he find those wells of strength to grasp onto the final painful filaments of life? I remember shouting into this creature’s ear—deaf, incontinent, and old, he had somehow lived longer than I would: “Don’t be afraid! Just sleep now!” And so he did. And I was left alone in silence, waiting for my turn to come.

I wouldn’t want you to ever see or remember me like this. Retracing our steps in this city streets is as close as I can get to you now without putting you in danger.