I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

Seemingly small lives writ large—the ones that cause you to pause over your morning coffee, stopping midsentence in the kitchen, the smell of toast in the air, a finger wrapped around the handle of the cup, a vague memory, perhaps, of the last time you saw the grocer/dentist/mechanic—that pull you back to yourself, to the fleeting nature of life, to the shiver-inducing fact that that will be you one day, that it can and will all be taken away, that it can and will end. You bring the coffee cup close to your face, you need something, someone, to hold on to, to ground you, to bring you back to the small moments of life and not the vast, cold universe where death awaits. Best to table that thought. Time to butter the toast now, to make a list, to begin another day with the assumption, the hope, please God, that there will be so many more, that they won’t just end. So your mind, on overload, thinks of the day to come, the errands to run, the meetings, so much to do. Too early for existential dread. But then your wife, your husband, your partner enters the kitchen, heading for the coffee, and doesn’t understand the hug, the intensity of it this early, doesn’t understand that you’ve been reading an obituary and drifted, if just for a moment, to wondering about your own.