By Katherine Plumhoff
Carefully read the entire test before doing anything. In order to ensure the accuracy of this exam, you should not use more than the allotted time of one life.
1. Give me a Tibetan sky burial. Leave my body outside and let the birds carry it away in their beaks, one pinch at a time. May I sustain them. May the unbroken line of the horizon sustain you.
2. Give me a Korean funeral. Sit with my body for three days. Put my portrait up. Spoon rice into my mouth for my plentiful afterlife. Bind my body in seven layers and lower me into the earth once, twice, thrice. Make sure I am facing the mountains so the land and sky spirits will welcome me to join them. Stack food and stones, each placement a prayer, in the four cardinal directions. If there is no space to bury me whole, burn me to soot and bury that.
3. Are you taking notes? I will only say this once.
4. Give me a Nordic water burial. Build me a death ship and send it out into the waves. Suffer not the fever of my absence. Every year on my death day, dip yourself in the ocean. Let it gather beneath you, an embrace and a buoy; push yourself to its surface. Watch it drip off the planes of your body. Watch it leave you, unmarked.
5. Sit shiva with my family. Rip a hands-breadth tear into their clothing or pin a torn ribbon to their lapels so they can wear their grief on the outside, love’s exit wound. Sit on low boxes scattered like toys and cover the mirrors, breaking your body into discrete parts you can see at once.
6. Hire keening women to sing me a death wail. Listen to the Gaelic, the long, sustained farewell, the rhythmic repetition of round vowels steeped in extemporaneous empathy. Pay them well.
7. Bring my body to the Ganges. Wrap me in pleats so bright that from the sky I look shrouded in fire even before I’m burned. Dip me in the water, let me dry, then paper me in sandalwood and heady incense. Burn me in a ghat and cast my ashes like a spell over the river.
8. Five years after you bury me, exhume my bones and wrap them afresh in a Madagascan turning of the bones. Coat the scent of my decay in perfume and dance with me, feet stomping the earth in winding pirouettes. Ask me for blessings freely given. Feel them settle over you like mercy.
9. Build me an ofrenda. Pile it with Crunchwrap Supremes. Make orange-scented pan de muertos dough and shape my bones between your fingers; lay them out for me, soft and sugar-dusted. Write me a skull poem to read to your children; smile. Place a river of cempasúchil, arranged in citrón constellations, down the middle of your altar. I will follow the licks of flame back to you.
10. Let music slow and soften the hand of sorrow. Give me an all-hits, no-skips sendoff: Alicia Keys and Maggie Rogers, Carole King and Ella Mai. Play your favorites and let them be bops. Sing along.
11. When you hear of my death, buy a new jar of raspberry preserves. Wrench open the gingham lid and spread what’s inside, seed-studded and sweet, on a cracker. Nurture yourself in this moment and the next. When the seeds get stuck in your teeth, burrowing shards of life, work them out with your tongue, smash them in your molars, swallow the sound.
12. Burn me and bury my ashes beneath a hydrangea bush in bloom. Wound not the roots; dig with your own hands, crumbling clots over the dust of my dust. Stand from kneeling and bow your head, bend your trunk, towards the flowers. Lean in. See the pastel slips of petals; touch the soft pleats fanning out around their pin. With dirt under your nails, gather an armful and carry them home.
13. Pause reading to draw a bouquet of flowers on the closest receipt you can find. Then go to #14.
14. On my birthday, kneel at my grave, ankles crossed behind you, toes scraping the earth, hands tensed and touching; let your weight keep the earth from bucking, riotous at my enclosure. Stand up and dust the damp from your knees. Stomp once for good measure. Come back next year.
15. Everything before this was a lie. Forget everything you have read.
16. Do not bury me at all. I do not want a box in a hole in a cemetery surrounded by other boxes in other holes. Donate my useful organs. Let my lungs inflate someone else’s chest, my eyes convey images to someone else’s brain, my heart pump blood through the far reaches of someone else’s body. If any or all of those parts of me are useless or damaged, know that I am sorry. Burn them and burn the rest. Dispose of me in a way economical of time, space, and expenditure. Find a bench facing something beautiful—a spray of roses or a blue-green lake—and screw a plate to it with my name and an invitation to sit and see. This is what I really want.
17. Don’t donate my organs. Give my entire body to science. Find the med students who will slice open my skin, pin it back to frame my organs, who will cut and dice the very meat of me, who will hold me in their hands and call back that memory when not-yet-expired lives are in front of them. Invite them to dinner and tell them stories. Don’t leave the table until everyone has laughed, you included.
18. Ignore the ideas and directives in numbers 1 through 17. Decide how to grieve. Then how to live. Keep busy so that others will continue to work on this exam without disturbance from you. Do not make any sign to indicate your having completed the assigned task.
Katherine Plumhoff is from the Great Lakes and now lives near the ocean. Find her short stories in X-R-A-Y, The Journal, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, and Heavy Feather Review. Her story "The Bread of Life" was selected for Best Small Fictions 2024. Reach her at @kplumhoff or katherineplumhoff.com.
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