Aftermath

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The day I died: July 6, 2021. I remember it like yesterday.

I woke up a little after seven, though it might be more accurate to say that in the final night of dreams I never slept. Sometimes I was with my darlings, all my darlings. They were the same age at the same time, as they had never been in life. They would be fourteen years old forever. I would see to that.

But I traveled into nightmares, too, whenever my thoughts drifted forward half a day to imagine my final minutes. No Death Row, of course, and no march to the scaffold, not in these enlightened times; rather, we would stroll together, I and the observers and reporters and admirers and guards, to the Chamber of Morpheus.

What wonderful things words are. Three-quarters of a century ago the suicide flights of the Japanese Air Force became the kamikaze, the Heavenly Wind; today the death cell and sleep without end become the Chamber of Morpheus.

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