Somewhere you have never heard of there is a guillotine and the pocket of your vintage bootcut blue jeans is the basket into which the cuttings fall. (Some people find this upsetting.) In the interest of keeping level heads out of slanted headlines (try harder to understand), the executions have been censored—but you may pick through the aftermath. So you decrypt the dead under a cracked spyglass, scan the contortions of their mouths for traces of hurt to misread as indignation. This is not entertainment, this is an (pre)occupation; your line of work is the living obituary. It is your obligation to catalogue the names too paltry for newsprint, gravestones, memorial services, or back tattoos. It is your obligation to appraise the heads that burden your seams, assess their incendiary potential, and bury the most buzzworthy of these in your senator’s inbox. (When you receive an automatic reply on win-win solutions in foreign affairs, it is your obligation to dig it out of your junk folder.) The living obituary is a respectable vocation and an undesirable one (you are not proud but you are fulfilled). You cup cheeks, pull away slop-chopped hairs; you shout each name sharp and hurried, then push open one eyelid, followed by the other. You peer into the eyes of every product that rolls across your platform. Occasionally the eyes peer into you. You slide another head from your pocket, adjust the glass, then swipe the sweat from the victim’s stiffened brow. When the head’s eyelids lift (lazily, heavily), you do not draw back your hand. The pupils dilate on your face before softening into their final expression, pained and unsurprised. To die blaming a world that scraps your head in a bin is unproductive. Privately, you hope they blame you. Once more you mouth the head’s name but give it no sound. You are not here to observe death, but to observe the dead. It is far from your responsibility to rouse the dying. (And to disturb them a second time hollows you.) You present the cutting to the Executioner, but he shakes his head and will not take it from your hands. He chides, hoarse and unmoved: “Do not vilify me for what gravity has done.”
Payton Dodd is a professional arranger of alphabet soups. And sometimes rearranger, if the soup would benefit. Dodd’s fiction has previously appeared in Westwind.
Header photo by Brian A Jackson, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Payton Dodd by Minnette Brooks and Dennis Wright.
