When his Mother came into the room he tried to present himself as vibrant. He tried to mix against the other objects in the room: the potted plant that stretched to the ceiling and sometimes ruffled when the air conditioning became too fervent, the ever-shifting dust that settled on the floor, the nearby couch with beckoning cushions. He was part of it all, and she would see that. Experiences surrounded and he mingled with them on his space on the floor, rolling in the dust, bouncing air onto the plant. He breathed it in, and became different with every breath. There was still yet to be done.
But his Mother left the room in a hurry and did not see him living as an organism as full of life as she. Days went by and he began to lose hope in his Mother, began to realize that he was to die once more, though now more conclusively and truly. His muscles heaved sadly under the weight of this new resignation. The glut of potential he knew he had inside of him was going to be stuffed into the ground together with his living carcass. Then he would suffocate, too, as the worms came and he would finally die a true death.
Some presence came through the hallway one afternoon- he could tell by the yellowish light- and he felt the presence of measuring tape at his side. Something stood over him and he could feel his Father smiling as measurements of his second body, his bare soul resign, were taken. He knew what this was for, that they needed to know how long to make the coffin and how wide, and this was fine. If he was to be present for it then he wanted to make sure it looked superb, and so have sweet memories that would last him forever of a perfect funeral - or up until his death, at least.
As the tape snapped back into his socket for the first time he thought something and panicked. How will he know he had truly died? When the dirt fills the air pockets and the casket seals his body inside, and his lungs make their last cry for oxygen, how will that feel? The sickness had changed him surely but it hadn't killed him “completely.” What if, and the horror of this possibility terrified him, he never slept, and when the mice crawl over his body looking for some fleshy members to gnaw he will only sit there and spectate, not die, feel the mice dig through his temples, his corneas, his genitals and then contend with an onslaught of worms over the scraps of his still consumable pieces. He struggled to stop the measuring but it only went on, and soon, with shocking abruptness, he was loaded into a beautiful wooden casket that- he had to admit- framed him nicely, though it was more like the casket swallowed him up. Before he had time to protest, his clothes were changed and his lips became caked with powder, and soon his whole face was enveloped in a soft, dry substance which impeded all movement, even facial movement, so that he could not unstuck his lips from each other, or pull his mouth with the muscles outside his cheekbones. Every plot of skin was covered in substance, like formaldehyde, and solidified as a photograph solidifies its subject. He could feel his Mother's expectations seep off of his dried up skin, even though his Mother was not in the room, even absent from his life and now from his death. Only his Father grew more proud as the makeup, the formaldehyde, the clothes and the casket surrounded and hardened him, congealing his features into a harmonious whole. He felt set in stone.
There was nothing he could do about his burial. He knew it had to come; he wouldn't want to let his Father down, his Father had been planning it for months. He felt over his newly arranged body, imaginarily checked each part with his mind. His head was cocked straight and forward with his mouth and eyes closed definitely, which gave off the impression of total death, of nothingness and desolation; though the mouth especially was contorted in such a way as to express some- whether true or not- quiet blissful liberation. This single manipulation managed to overshadow the depressing concept of his death, his decayed corpse lying there in the casket, waiting to be shoved underground and forgotten, with a glaring illusion of safety, a veil of incredulity- the moment when one realizes a mortal, fatal crisis is in fact only a dream, and so suddenly something so serious is taken frivolously.
Except that the contortion of his lifeless features represented not a moment, but an entire context for which people were to view his demise. He knew this, and yet he thought it was needed, for he didn't want to scare his relatives with the unpleasant truth, which he found most concisely exampled in the rotten odor of his skin. This, however, was covered up pleasantly, by the formaldehyde and makeup, on any part the clothes left showing. He was dressed in a formal, rigid suit, it seemed, but it presented him with such high honor that he didn't mind. He wouldn't be able to move much in the coffin, even as the worms crawled behind the small of his back, but he was flattered enough by the bestowment that he didn't think of those things.
