The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt—just to feel haunted.

There are no pieces, no parts, that can be assembled to make sense of the absence my sister has become. There is just a sudden, shocking emptiness where her life used to be. I try to count the voids. To trace their shapes. When a person dies, you do this. You try to account for what’s gone. Some of what’s missing will be clear right away. The missing sound of their voice, or the to-do lists they’ll never complete, or the new blankness that sits in their chair at breakfast. Those I’m ready for. But so much worse are the small, infuriatingly small gaps—really just pinprick holes—that Caroline leaves everywhere else. Emptiness, fired through my memories like buckshot, so scattered that I can’t quantify what’s gone. I can’t count it. I can’t measure it. My sister becomes a constellation of voids.

leave the lip gloss on. Bright things in nature are often poisonous. Let that be my defense, then. Let Aspen watch, and predators prowl, and all the waiting jaws yawn wider. I will be a ruin to consume.

It’s quiet, like a great contemplation has been divided up to be worked through by each of us. It makes me think of the aspen trees, individuals all above the earth, but bound together deep beneath. Instead of roots, the secret of last night binds us.

Sometimes people just die, and it will never, ever make sense.

This is not survival. No other animal on Earth partakes in such brutal excess. This is a human vice. And now, with my own humanity compromised, I can’t stand it.