Thoreau's Rooster

CatchAFAllingStarAndPutItInYourPocketNeverLetItFadeAway
          CatchAFallingStarAndPutItInYourPocketSaveItForARainyDay
          BEEP: (speakerphone) Allison, call for you on line two. Allison! Allison!
          I am vacuuming the floors at Pottery Barn Kids. The store has not opened yet. I have somehow been corporately molested into this shit hole of a job, where I am a sales associate/maid/stock guy.
          As I vacuum, my general manager, Frank, has made a very corporate decision that even before the store opens, we must all be subjected to the Pottery Barn Kids soundtrack to entice our selling moods. CatchAFallingStarAndPutItInYourPocket
          BEEP: (speakerphone) Allison, call on line two!!!!!
          Me: Aloha! Thanks for calling Pottery Barn Kids at Lenox. This is Allison-
          Susan: Ahhhhhhhhhhh. (This teeters out into a whimper.)
          Me: Hello?
          Susan: Oh my Gooooooooooddddddd. Ahhhhhhhhhh. She’s dead, she’s dead.
          Me: Susan?
          Susan: Yeah. Ahhhhhhhh.
          Me: Dude, get it together. What the fuck, man? I’ve got to finish vacuuming. Are you coming into work today?
          Susan: Lindsey. . . Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
          Me: What happened? Is she OK?
          Susan: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Lindsey died last night. Tommy, Bobby, and Ben are in jail. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
          Me: Holy fucking. . . fuck. Oh my God. Where are you? I’ll be right there.
          A deformed skeleton of one of our early ancestors was found in a cave. He was tended to with compassion, though I am unsure how scientists were able to tell. It was apparent that he was not left for dead, that someone, or maybe all of his tribe felt some sort of empathy and could not leave him. This was one of the first discoveries that exhibited human compassion and illustrated the notion of family. Togetherness. Care for the dead.
          Religion progressed and a notion of the afterlife became a cultural universal – quite the social phenomena. Variations of what death entailed were evident within different cultures. Belongings were buried (even servants) to accompany the dead in the afterlife; coins were placed on eyes and mouths to grant passage into the netherworld across the river Styx, for the ferryman Charon; bodies were embalmed, anointed with oil; bodies were buried, cremated. Tears were shed.
          And now death seems to usher in freezable casseroles and overly exuberant floral arrangements. We mourn the loss of a person; we mourn the future memories that will no longer be made. We mourn for the loss of the future – that it will never have this person again. Most selfishly, we mourn for ourselves, because we too have been robbed.
          We are young and stupid. Lindsey was young and stupid. Somehow we are careless in our youth; I once read that old age is like an island, surrounded by death. We tend to forget that all of life is that island, death lapping at our precious shores. And we prance on the beaches, dancing and singing – uncertain, though sure of the future. We had once been sure of long lives.
          An evening earlier, Lindsey’s body was laid on the table, flopping around like a dying fish – clumsy and shuddering. She had not had a seizure for years, but that night a little seizure somewhere in the back of her head bounced back with fury. She died on her living room table, stuffed with a cocktail of drugs: rolls (ecstasy), shrooms, pot, and four margaritas. Her hair was slathered in sweat, which stuck in tight clumps a round her face. Her eyes were off, looking somewhere into the near distance. Tommy administered CPR; all the while Bobby scurried to flush the drugs while Lindsey’s fiancé, Ben, shrieked in the background. Absolute hysteria.
          Susan and I are sitting on my back porch. We have evolved from those archaic rituals to mourn the dead – pulling out the brains through the nostrils to ensure preservation or shrouded in black chiffon veils. No, we are the inventors to our own customs.
          We are wearing the most fabulous dresses that I managed to dredge up from my closet. We are wearing crinkled old party hats and costume jewelry. The heavy bracelets clank against one another in song. A bottle of Jose Cuervo rests on the ground, looking up at us indignantly. Fools, he must be thinking.
          On by back porch we are laughing and crying, throwing back shot after Valium after shot of tequila, blinking away the graying edges of our peripheral vision.
          In the haze, I think of death. Perhaps death was always here, imminent and existing long before our creation. Just dying, dying, dying. Maybe it was us who intruded on death, maybe it was us who failed to consider whose fault we should place blame: death or the living.
          “Where is she?” Susan asks, slugging back another shot.
It was years ago that I denounced my Christian faith in favor of Deism, and I find myself at a loss of words. I could betray my own beliefs to make her stop crying. I could play the poser who pretends to believe that somewhere golden mansions shine in the sky, behind the clouds, where golden trees drop golden fruit into wanton mouths of the blessed. I do this, for the sake of my friend.
          I think about a pair of red stilettos that I gave her the previous year. They were stunning – red satin with a delicate black heel. I wonder if she will be buried in them. I sadly think about those shoes, black feet marks staining the inside--Lindsey’s little toes squeezed inside of them, and now, they sit alone in a corner, pleading to be worn.
          A humid hour later we are smashed. We agree on the idea of throwing shot glasses at the building next to us. Trite acts of vandalism to replace a eulogy. Tonight the sky hangs low, so low that the stars are beating against the rooftops, our heads, the sagging trees. We fill the shot glasses full and stagger on the side of my balcony.
          “For Lindsey!” we shout in the thick night air. The tequila is suspended in air before it splashes to the ground. The shot glasses shatter against the brick wall.
          And somewhere in the sky, Lindsey sits on a gray cloud. She lies on her stomach and gingerly taps her cigarette on the side of the cloud. Ashes sprinkle down. Her foot is bobbing up and down – a nervous habit – and the red stiletto will fall from the sky. It will tumble effortlessly, passing through a family of geese, soaring by an airplane of perplexed flyers. It will fall into someone’s backyard, someone who is barbequing. They will be confused, but joyful at the same time. They will take it inside their home and leave in on the mantle of the fireplace, where it will always spark conversation.
          “Oh, that’s the lovely shoe that fell from the sky.”