Ten Tips for the Denial of Death

If after years lost wandering in the desert of grief your sister Catherine has returned to you, ignore unsettling Majthenyian foliage to seek satisfaction while you can.

One: If potatoes are fried with onions and yellow peppers, find your usual post-potato lethargy made tolerable by her presence, Catherine’s.

Two: Resist the urge to reminisce, as your reminiscences may not be her reminiscences.

Three: If you have loved a memory for nearly twenty years, avoid anxious rumination over what Kraay-zy witchcraft allows this corporeal Catherine to measure up quite so exactly. Get all steamed up about loving her for the rest of your days. Read a few pages of A Most Strange and True Discourse…Of Incestuous Copulation (1600), a suspicious find upon your aunt’s otherwise Folletian bookshelf.

Four: Catch a fish. Gut the fish. Fry the fish in butter and lemon. Season to taste.

Five: Glimpsing something metallic from a rear window, something like the cylinder you stepped into at CERN, fear perchance that’s Klaas J. Kraay heard clicking his tongue in some distant vestibule of your consciousness. Focus instead on the oily Perch flavour clinging to your palate.

Six: Stroke the hair you’ve always loved. Look at her deepset Marianne Cottillard eyes. Remark hilariously upon their resemblance to your dinner. Hear her laugh.

Seven: Adhere to her bloody nose. Adhere to her sinus infection. Adhere to her low-pain threshold groans. Adhere to her frightened glances. Don’t ask her what’s wrong. Blame with limited certainty the under-preparedness of the evening’s freshwater game fish.

Eight: Play five Knee Play s and wipe her mouth with a warm cloth. Wipe with what’s been left in you, what you had as a boy, and what’s been left to grow monstrous since—and that thing is your need.

Nine: If Catherine plays popular music on 99.5 FM after wearying of the artificial Knee Plays, hear meteorologist Karl Bohnak saying: Local, provincial, federal, and world health authorities are concerned as a case of what’s thought to be the deadly Ebola-Zaire virus has appeared at the Sault Area Hospital. WHO Spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris expressed her concern: ‘With no known ongoing outbreak of Ebola elsewhere in the world it’s baffling that… ’”

Ten: If Bohnak’s urgency ratifies Catherine’s dread, encourage her to get some sleep. Throw the radio in the lake. Kick at a howling Runsitter but then regret it as he cowers. Crawl into bed beside her. Look at the moon through a warped window pane. Hide your face between her shoulders and hope to have a good run.