Revenence

Whenever I find myself in remote places outside my comfort zone, I romanticize all the ways I could die, and I inch towards it. Nothing makes me appreciate and feel the weight of my existence quite like contemplating its eventual end. Is this the timeline where I fall off a cliff and my unknown, recovered body becomes a local mystery? Or will I be the last to leave the tavern and freeze to death on the side of the road, walking back to the lodge? Will a state trooper recover my body from a ravine where it’s been partially consumed by the local fauna? So I go climb that mountain, stay until last call, and go for a solo picnic in the woods. I live through that moment, the exact moment where in another timeline I wasn’t so lucky. Then I know, no, this is not how I go in this one. I’ll find out how, eventually.

That’s why I didn’t get out of the soaking tub when the pipes began to rattle inside the tiled wall, nor when the spout violently sprayed murky amber-colored water. Of all the ways I anticipated my death, drowning in a warm bath of biohazard sludge was not one of them. The unexpectedness of it was delightful. Even if I had found the desire to get out, I wouldn’t have been able to. The downers, the wine, and the warm salted bathwater dulled my ability to feel and move. Feeling content, I closed my eyes and, without taking a deep breath, I slipped under the water, giving in.

Apparitional images and a life that did not belong to me flickered before my eyes. Long, thick strands of midnight hair came out of the pipes like tentacles and reached for me, enveloping me in a cocoon where inside my skin boiled, dissolved, and mutated. My bones grew colder and denser. Deep forest green eyes met my honey stare and replaced it. I would have felt pain if I weren’t primarily consumed by longing and rage.

I don’t recall stepping out of the tub, donning my silk robe, sandals, and leaving without makeup on, a purse, or even dry hair, but I do remember reaching a gate. Rusted iron, padlocked, sealed to the living. My hands moved without my consent, sliding a hidden pin, lifting the lock like it was a trick I’d practiced for centuries. The cemetery opened to me as if it had been waiting.

That’s where I saw him. Soaked to the bone, shirt hanging loose, hair dripping as though he’d walked through the same bathwater I had. Our eyes caught, and the world fell quiet. I didn’t know him, not truly, yet I felt him like an old burn scar, a long-lost limb. We embraced slowly, desperately. A gramophone whirred somewhere deep in the graves, soft and broken, the kind of melody that carries both joy and mourning. We danced atop cracked stone, our bare feet slipping on moss, and it didn’t matter.

The night unraveled in fragments after that. Wine found hidden behind rubble, our mouths stained red. His hand holding mine through the alleyways and the crowd. Men who jeered turned pale when they saw me, their laughter caught in their throats as if I’d peeled back my face to show them what lived beneath. We couldn’t cross doorways brushed with salt, so we stayed outside, drunk, knocking, rattling shutters, whispering until dogs howled and babies screamed. We laughed until it echoed too long, sounding less like laughter and more like wailing.

But then the laughter thinned. The air shifted. We moved with purpose now, side by side, through headstones and down into stone steps swallowed by earth. An abandoned crypt waited, mausoleum walls heavy with mildew, its door sealed in rust. Yet we entered as though it owed us.

Inside, she was waiting. A woman, or what had been one, locked in a stone box, too small for even a child, with no air and no light, yet alive, her skin parchment-thin and pulling tight against her broken, bent bones. Her eyes rolled like glass marbles in their sockets, her mouth too dry for words but not too dry for begging. I understood without being told: she had once been cruel, unspeakably so. She had carved her delights into flesh, and now she would never escape her own.

We knelt, not in reverence but ritual. He pulled tobacco from the folds of his shirt. I held a bottle of rum that hadn’t been in my hands a moment before. We poured, whispered, fed the curse with offerings, burnt and salted her decaying pale skin, sealing her torment for another cycle. Her shrieks came soft, like wind through broken reeds, rattling in my ribs.

When it was done, when the ritual was complete and the rum bled into the cracks of her prison, we stood lighter. Freer. We laughed again, clutching each other, dancing up the steps as though the screams behind us were a fiddle’s tune.

The rest is haze. Our bodies together in my hotel room, his mouth on mine, the sunrise spilling across us like spilled blood, and then sleep.

I woke alone. Sheets damp with sweat, soil, and wine. My hands, blackened at the nails. My hair smelled of smoke. I was no longer possessed, but I was not myself either. There was a pull, a command. By midmorning, I found myself at the corner store, buying rum, tobacco, wine; offerings I didn’t understand, yet knew must be replenished.

That’s where I saw him again. The man from the night before, standing just beyond the cemetery gates, a bag in his arms, the same strange pull in his eyes. We walked together without speaking, down to the tomb, restocking the hidden altar, our bodies moving like memory. When the last bottle was set, the silence broke.

He looked at me then, truly looked, human again, and smiled.
“Coffee?” he asked. “And maybe beignets. I think we’ve earned it.”

I laughed, not because it was funny, but because the weight of it all needed breaking. I said yes. And together we left the dead behind, the offerings waiting for whoever the night would claim next.

I don’t daydream of my death anymore. What comes after is longer, heavier, and it lasts forever.