Arrest

By Tejas Yadav

You fell down without a warning on Wednesday. Thud! Dead in the middle of the marketplace. People ran to help, turn you, examine you, lift you. You didn’t care; they were foolish to even try. You had left without paying for the items in your shopping cart. I called you on Monday and you were fine. Sure, you were anxious about family problems, about your pension and about every damn thing in the world but at your age you had little else to talk about. I took it as a sign of normalcy. Now I think, so did you. Then how come your heart didn’t follow the banality of its lub-dub beating on and on like it has for all these years past? You went to the shops and just like that, it decided to explode, arrest, attack. Heartless, you fell without a warning.

(They will say when they read this: oh why keep talking to this dead person, in second person? You know why. That’s all there is to be said on the matter. Now keep reading, you are not done dying.)

Mother tried calling you later in the day and left a message on your answering machine. You’re far away to press buttons now so I’ll tell you what she said. “Charles, how’s everything? Just calling to check up on you. You must be out shopping. Call me when you’re home. Love you.” She does love you but does love reach the ether where you drift? Or does it encounter a blockade upon cardiac arrest? You used to say “I love you with all my heart.” And now what? Cardiac arrest, love arrest.

You didn’t see her cry when they broke the news. “Why the marketplace? Why today, Wednesday?” Inane questions, you’d say and as always, you’d be right. You didn’t suffer, you passed on instantaneously. So Mother has that to hold on to; only, now the rest of us suffer. You, like others before you, have left the living to mourn and deal with the mess of untangling your life. It’s always the ones left behind who write stories.

Here’s a little story I wrote for you: Your heart is starting to rot underground with the rest of your body. I don’t believe they have cell phone coverage six feet under. Even if they did, arrested hearts don’t talk back. So is that a comforting story? Or you want an inane one, of denial and anger?

Okay, so you won’t read this. But I will keep writing to you. For weeks from now, hell, for months and years. The burdensome living labour. You dropped like a bomb, merciless, and now we will keep wading through the debris. I’m not blaming you, no. You were never one to be selfish—how could you be? Even your shopping cart had chocolates for me.

(They will say: it’s all nice and sweet to mourn loss, but is this even a story? You know fiction is nothing but holding up a mirror to life. And finding death looming in the shadow.)

You didn’t leave a will, so I will claim your ten year old labrador. The adults can figure out the money and your apartment. Frizzles is coming home to me. He already knows where your gravestone is, he tried to do his business there. We all want to claim a part of you. I write my way out of this because no one else knows your heart the way I do. And no, it’s not lodged in the dry earth. It’s here, tapping away to the beat of my laptop’s keyboard. Shh, Frizzles. Listen! Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

By Tejas Yadav