Alien Bells.

Pearce, Michael

When you die you won't know you're dead. You'll just lie there, drunk as the worm in your nostril, humming every song you ever heard, until a warm wind bathes your skin and a single thought stretches thin as a spider's dream as every door in your body opens to the swarm that loves you. Then your memories will shake loose and fall and keep on falling until they are everywhere and you will be falling, although you won't know it, you'll be growing and falling in a dry swirl of color and dust and the smell of burning hair. The next time you die it will be a merciful blur, an anesthetic yawn that carries you to the city that broke my heart, the city that breaks my heart every day--you'll be standing there on the street and then you'll start walking, slowly, like a pilgrim, one resurrected foot in front of the other. I'll bump into you then. I'll know you like an old song and invite you into my home and feed you soup and sliced bread and give you the cap and scarf my sister knitted and watch you closely, waiting for something. I'll keep watching, and maybe I'll get closer and smell the damp wool of your shirt, see the hairs growing on your moles, hear your lungs whistle as you breathe. I'll tell you the beginnings of stories, hoping you'll take over and spit some life into them so they can get up and walk by themselves and find their way toward that slippery staircase called The End. I'll beg you to bless my family with an old prayer, spoken in Hebrew or some forgotten tongue, and I'll sniff your breath as you speak and then I'll know what Hebrew smells like. I'll have only one question to ask you, and that is Did all those wasted years shrink my soul? And I'll have only one more question, and that is Can I love my child even as he laughs in my face? And one more: Is it really my fault? But by then you'll be on your way, finding your way back to a tiny hill town where you can be a child and wake up to the alien bells of the old limestone church. And one day you'll watch the colors in the sky congregate in an anxious shimmer, a vision, an angel, and you'll drop to your knees on a sharp-graveled road and pray for all of us: me, my family, you and your many selves, and the road, yes, the road that bloodies your knees and strings our lives together.