Letters to Dead Authors, #7

Dear Emily Brontë,

Doctor Beede tells me, one finger probing greedily under his vest, that it is pulmonary consumption, or tuberculosis.

“You see?” I want to shout, for the feeling is of a lifelong suspicion confirmed. It is somehow not news. News is what can no longer distract from this.

“The disease is slow to progress, but usually fatal,” he tells me, not entirely concealing his satisfaction. If he is waiting for me to repudiate my teachings under the threat of death, he can wait forever.

So I approach the vanishing point of view. The horizon line I thought remote turns out to be penciled on a wall a hand’s-breadth from my nose.

I am conscious of a strangely breathless feeling. It is not the tubercles. I believe I am having an emotion. Surely it is not fear. Though it is natural for the organism to feel a little nervous as the axe comes down. Living creatures, as a rule, are lamentably partisan in the matter of their personal survival. Ants may be an exception. On evidence, I am not.

In fact, I am clenched like a fist, as if around a treasure I feared to lose. But there is nothing in that fist. It is the feeling of clenching, the fist itself, that I know as I. When I open my hand, it will be gone. But lost?

But ow, ow, oh, O, I’m not, I’m not ready! There are still so many things I wanted to learn. About death, yes. But not by dying, like every Tom, Dick, and Harry!

I am the hunter who, bent over the lion’s tracks, feels its breath on the back of her neck.

Of course, every hunter is taken down by a lion—of some species or other. It’s just that I had hoped to examine its tonsils, probe its caries, sample its carrion reek before the great jaws close. To answer the burning question that has been my life, before, before—

What will become of my school?

I will take a moment to compose myself.

There.

—before the fire goes out.

I will take another moment.

There. I am dying. I do not know why that should make me weep. Who isn’t dying?

Yours,

Corpse-in-Waiting Joines