Oblivio Gate

Fainting at My Grandfather's Funeral

(- =X`ek`e^XkDp>iXe[]Xk_\iËj=le\iXc I lost my fear of dying when I slammed my hand in the passenger-side door of my father’s ’61 Cadillac Coupe DeVille as we waited for a parking attendant outside M’s Funeral Home. It was religious, the way pain shook my hand, hard and electric, straight through the bone in my shoulder, like the funeral director in his cheap suit, assuring me with a man’s grip and a wink that it was alright, that he was sorry for my loss. But nothing was alright and I was not a man, but a fifteen-year-old boy who listened to his father sob quietly all night through the plaster walls. (. And the only thing I could be sure of was that I was dying when the heavy door swung shut, and what seemed like a procession of translucent moths flew from my ears and fluttered against my burning face. The entire natural world transformed itself, became a silver well shaft, a disarticulation of synapse and light like the crown chakra’s white lotus, whose petals began to blossom, then sparked, then fell away, until there was nothing left of the body but the ecstatic vision of the moon-faced valet gliding toward me, (/ his tattooed arms extending right out of their sleeves, like the two budding wings of an angel. ...