The Long Parade, By Sara Spring

What is my story? Well, it began when I was young and then I grew up but that doesn’t really fill in the gaps of my life, now does it? Perhaps I am just fooling with you. The truth is my life isn’t that interesting at all. I am quite the bore. I prefer to sit indoors and stare out the grimy windows of my flat. See all the little people below scurrying off to their loved ones and jobs, appointments and stuff. Sometimes, I will catch flies and tie strings around their little bodies. When I let them go they buzz around in circles- to the left and then to the right. Eventually they die and that’s great fun. Then I get to have little burial ceremonies for them. I cover their bodies with little sheets of white toilet paper. Sometimes I role play that I am an officer just arriving on the scene, swaggering to the table I peer down at my subject. Bludgeoned? I ask. Around me is silence. The silence can irritate me some so I take a few of my clothes and throw them onto chairs, drawing faces on paper and make believe they are real people. I learned how to throw my voice so that they sound realistic. I make conversation in this fashion and it is good fun. It passes the time. Usually I conduct an investigation of the death, write up a report on forms I took from my father’s days of being an officer and file them away in my desk in alphabetical order of the names I give them. Then I wrap the little bodies up and take them to my closet. Then, I lift a corner of the green shag carpeting and I before I tuck it back in I say a eulogy for the dead creature. I have to admit they aren’t decomposing as quickly as I thought they would and the bodies are starting to pile up. Usually this is when I wander into the lab and drop them into the mouths of the people lying in there waiting to be embalmed and dressed up for their impending funeral.

Death is such an obvious inevitability that I often wonder how my father dealt with it on the force. He’d used his gun a couple of times, wounded one and killed another. He seemed so wispy of a man that I was surprised he could even hold a weapon. In the end he sat in his chair near the window with a blanket covering his legs, staring at the people outside scurrying around. Then one day he just disappeared. He became a shell that was once occupied. I didn’t see any peace on his wrinkly old dehydrated face or feel any relief that he had passed on. Death existed in that moment of discovering him. Now it is just me in this large old house. People die every day and when they come in I am expected to prepare them as if making a dinner. It’s always the same steps and usually pretty straight forward as the population is mostly elderly in this town. No one really pays any mind to me making it simpler to slip the flies in the mouths or up inside the noses.

When you think of it, the flies end up with a proper burial in the end.