Dead Collections

by Isaac Fellman

The collector is an honest lone vampire; the archivist is a licensed vampire. —Andrei Codrescu, Bibliodeath

Oh, sometimes there are ashes, and a few times bones, and there’s often quite a lot of hair, but in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life, crowded all around with papers and artifacts and ephemera, but with a terribly small hollowness within. You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite.

It’s hard to remember my first impressions of Elsie, who has become so familiar to me that those memories are all worn away like stones in a watery cave. First impressions are strange things. I believe in them the way I believe in fortune-telling. What, then, did she portend?

I felt my voice drop three notes, the way people’s voices do when they meet another person who’s ever been deep in fandom. The vocal cords thicken with irony and the dirt of the trenches, and you don’t have to say any more; you know you share a secret.

Let me launder your pain like Mob money.

“Touché,” she said, and I did feel it, through the phone, I felt the touch, the very palpable hit, my thin brittle saber against her jacketed chest.

The phone had been the only thing that protected me from wanting, and it was a very thin thing, a bit of plastic, a rubber cord.

It had hit me in the tenderest part of my adolescence, the sharp hinge under the skin of 1993, a funny bone far too delicate to absorb any real blows.