Plagiarism

Previous Version Published with Outrageous Fortune in 2015

When I died you puckered your lips, forcing them into a soft, pink little “o” shape because you thought it was what was appropriate. I would have told you that you should know better than to try to fool me with what they deemed appropriate, but I knew you wouldn’t be able to hear me so I didn’t even try. Your eyes tried to fool them like your lips and it worked because no one thought to look into your eyes—they only peered into my lifeless ones and avoided staring at your surly mouth.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” they whisper. “You know she was mixed up with the wrong crowd.” They clear throats and hum and hah as tongues flap against teeth and trip over the wrong words. But words don’t really exist and neither do crowds, so I try to ask them what the point is really, after all this fuss what really is their point, but they can’t hear me because they’re too busy listening to you. You spoon-feed them your lies and they lap lap lap until they can’t taste the poison anymore, and your surliness remains oh so surly and the smirk remains only with me.

“Poor girl.”

My funeral was grand, so grand that my mother cried and my sister wailed and I just thought to myself that all of their saline tears tasted the same. But I didn’t know what yours tasted like because the ground swallowed me whole before you had the time to work up a sob. I thought the soil was soft, but it soon turned to mud and I tried to scream for you to come let me out but you didn’t come because you don’t listen. The liquefied dirt held tightly to my embalmed neck and I started to cry, regurgitating earthy drops and passing them off as my own tears—though I needed moisture and the soil was too selfish to share. So when you came to me a few weeks later, babbling as your conscience shrieked down at me from your bad shoulder, it was too late.

By then, the soil had won and the tears were all gone

and you wept for a pile of bones.