Invention of Dying, The. Brooke Biaz

and his good eye alight, “I would have thought it was the wrong moon.”

      “Oh,” I said, “You know something about The Moon? I thought you were more the terrestrial type? Earth. Larvae, wrigglers, grubbage, and the like?”

      Mee shrugged hugely, like an old silver ape perplexed with an abandoned bean tin.

      “Don’t get me wrong,” I said, “I don’t doubt you’ve eyed the Heavens. But you’re hardly a cosmologist, are you?” I said.

      He seemed to be contemplating the attitude of our solitary rubber plant as it dipped its wide open arms toward the even more open window and the blistering sun beyond.

      “No matter. Razor eel wait for no man.”

      Poor Mee. Pronounced “mere”, incidentally; not, as some insist, “mea”.

      Meanwhile, down at what then sufficed as the local clinic bat-loving old Death had turned up and, not to put too fine a point on it, all Hell was breaking loose.

      5.

      “I demand to see him,” she cried, having explained this three times previously, one shot fired closely across the bow of another. Math is immortal, as many will know. You might expect that these previous requests go largely unrecorded, but here is the extent of it:

      I don’t want to bore you with meandary. Suffice it, Death had “wished”, she had “desired”, and she had “wanted”. With each addition to her ghostly barrage her voice rose a full octave, climbing the ladder of trouble. Tres loon! The bat-loving necrologist was now fully firing.

      Perhaps there is something in the bat world of Death’s that would explain her irritation, her lively unrest there on the harbour front. Something in the world of the dying that is batly antithetical to our more general human understanding and feelings for life. Something frugivorous or nectarivorous, that comes with gritted variegated culmination and cannot be understood until you reach this, a blindness to a lack of person, to a person’s clear non-presence—because at that point Death was darting her eyes back and forth, from one corner to another of that front room of the office we locally called ‘the clinic’. No foresight could confirm the lack of the county clerk, no hearing could hear him there. But maybe, just maybe, that was what was going on, as Death flapped and swooped and echolocated her deadly way around the room. Perhaps it was this thin-winged and short-tempered battiness that drove our first encounter with Death to demand from the pale young woman behind the counter more information. Perhaps it was that Death’s mother had been born on the islands herself and her sense of inherited ownership flowed, much like lava seems to possess a sense of right as it engulfs your garden shed and makes its way up over the gasping family dog.

      “Well, no,” said Penny Apple, white haired and priming one of her well known grimaces that doubles as her youthful smile. That smile sat on her pale pink lipsticked lips like a bright fly before her withering voice, “he is not . . . here . . . yet. But. . .”

      Or perhaps, speculating a moment - and this is always possible - perhaps bats had nothing to do with what was unfolding in the clerk’s office, and Death’s motives were far more self-serving than we were ever to discover, either then or now.

      “Buuuuut?” Death cried, positively (and negatively) charged, all at once. An increasingly ionic pompadoured bat-lover.

      “Well, mam . . . ” began Penny, attempting to approach hot inveigling Fate; but then, noticing the fatefully darkening wings above front of her from across the clerk’s desk, fell into such a white fuzz behind the counter of the clerk’s office that she already appeared more like a shiny statue of a girl than an actual living person.

      An aside: the current Communion Island Apples are, as their very name suggests, remnants of a long lived dynasty of local apple entrepreneurs (“An Apple a Day . . . ”) whose orchards once began at southern Mount Welson and, travelling the lower slopes as the best apples do (on account of the frost and the weeviling life that dwells beneath those rocky overhangs), spread down around Routville and Morphew, along the thin winding road that links Haymon and Casemont and Toobay, until they come to rest in silvery sheds and a striped buntinged stall on the outskirts of Panapoon.

      “Mam,” the girl attempted again, apple of her cheeks now so brightly polished as to reflect the visitor.

      At that moment, as if somehow Apple ancestors were watching and chose to step in before tall, thin Penny (carved something like the stick on which a candied red delicious might sit; bleached of color and teetering there in full white mane) grew so indistinct that no one could tell her from a badly taken photograph of an opossum. At that moment, the clerk, who was no more knowledgeable then about Death than I was, no more accustomed to dying than a fence post is accustomed to the warmth and community of a kitchen, arrived.

      Voila!

      Sometimes you have to admire humanity for its sheer and abundant repetition of impossibility.

      Figure 3.

      6.

      For those with a keen interest, and wandering ways, the history of living and life on The Communions Islands runs roughly like this:

      Firstly, the islands themselves were founded in the Mycean period. By which I mean, when Communion rocks flowed over other Communion rocks in orange lit expedition, spewing from the funnel of a mountain which, mere minutes before, had been no more than a spray of something’s bright intention, and nothing remotely resembling life (as we and several other planets know it, at least) existed.

      This far back? Is that too far? Arguably (what does this word mean? The word is pure provocation!).

      Arguably (anyway), in essence, if not for the hollow that had been created then, along an emerging gorge (aflame still, as it was), so that where, later, water began to flow in rains that came—and for some decades would not stop, incidentally—if not for that gorge then no channel would have been formed. And if not for the channel then, as the coast shifted (as shifted it did; one minute a spit of sand in the shape of a knife, and the next minute a rocky escarpment resembling the future faces of our Founding Fathers) and redefined itself, then no hummock of rich earth would have formed. And, if not for that hummock of rich earth which, as hummocks go about their business, formed and extended itself and grew and extended itself further until what was a hummock became a coastal plain, if not for this then no alluvial tale could be told. Alluviality! Richness growing on richness. Hummock upon hummock. So that by the time the Mycean period had passed to the Ferotrophic and the Ferotrophic into the Anthrohalycon—or maybe this is my invention and this particular period is largely made up.

      But what the hoot! If the period fits enter it! So the first microbic flicker of our future had begun to appear, raising its microscopic head, flicking its microscopic tail, announcing its first Annual Communion Summer Fair maybe (Old Alyce Willeman’s Vanilla Sponge Surprise sure seems to come from this period. However, perhaps I digress!). By this time, thousands of years previous evolutionarily speaking, the basics were there. The rest we can skip over. Thus:

      Founding fathers, after whom future wings and wards and strolls would be named—the future Sir Alfred Compton Smythe, an “adventurer” (read: “mere boy, barely out of short pants”, soon to be “alcoholic”, sometime “swashbuckler”, frequent “insomniac”), often called merely Smythe, in light of his impersonal nature; Master (of cabinetmaking, something conferred by an ancient guild) Ernst Loobenthal (known, irresponsibly, as Looby, by the locally initiated, on account of his historically irreverent nature—this being a young man who later named his sorry children Pitt, Fitt and Fortune, to exemplify some innate understanding he had of his present and his future; a man who, indeed, followed his own pioneering footsteps by making a Fortune from the Pitts he Fitted into the surrounding hills, from which he (and latterly his underlings, miners, managers, train monkeys and, not to put too fine a point on it, slaves, extracted rare minerals and malekites: