Saprotrophic nutrition.

Wasn’t that what the therapist had called it?

One existence nourished by the death of another?

But was that not the case of all acts of parenthood and creation? A series of sacrifices made so that a child may flourish. Had we not sacrificed parts of ourselves? Our lifestyle, our own relationship, so that Phineas could live?

We imbued him with our own aspirations and desires. And we did so under the selfish notion that he would carry them long into the future, long after we were gone from the earth.

We carried him so that he might one day carry us.

We grieve his death now by remembering his life. But is it the responsibility of the living to harbour the dead, or is that a similar kind of selfishness? Is he tethered by our memories of him? Forced to forever walk the chambers of our heart as some half-remembered phantom?

When I try to imagine the afterlife I see a cave surrounded by such endless outer darkness. The yellow light of our shared existence reflecting endlessly against its wet flowstone walls. The light of the dead carried from hand to fumbling hand. Until those shaking hands grow weak, until no hands remain.

I look up to see Simone rise from the porch swing and slip back into the house. I call out to her but the sound is drowned out from overhead as a convoy of military helicopters flies low over the house and heads towards the city.

XXXIV

Outside there is pandemonium in the street, the arrival of the military having ignited some incendiary spark. Stoking a fire that has raged beneath us for some time but that has now risen from cracks in the ground to lick openly at our heels.

Women carry screaming children into car seats. Fathers grapple with backpacks and other pieces of hastily packed luggage. A minivan backs blindly into the road and collides with the back of a sedan, sending both vehicles spinning out of control.

We watch as people tear up lawns and jockey for position, trying desperately to avoid the growing pile-up of cars.

It’s only when an elderly couple emerge from their home and wander into the road that the commotion dies down. Their bodies are swollen, the whites of their eyes red. They hold hands and drift dreamily along the asphalt before embracing each other in a kiss.

The onlookers watch in silence as their skin turns transparent and their bodies knit together. Their muscles and tendons merging into a purple mass before falling away, like petals, to reveal a network of nerves that intertwine and then splay out in the wind.

They rise from the ground and ascend, nerves cast behind them like the branches of a willow tree.

For a moment there is an unnatural stillness to the air, a delicate peace. Then a shot rings out, clear and clean as if heard from across the crystalline surface of a lake, and chaos resumes. The elderly woman, still cocooned in her husband’s nervous system, grows opaque, her pale skin reappearing.