Zoë Davis
Listen to Zoë read her story
“I want to be buried,” I said.
My husband glanced up from the potatoes he was peeling for lunch. A pile of grinning skin lay beneath his deft fingers.
“Is now really the time?”
“Is there ever really a time?” I nudged the clutter on the sideboard.
He set the peeler down with a wet finality that signaled his undivided attention.
“Is this because I said I wanted to be cremated?”
Two weeks ago, we attended his mother’s funeral. Funerals were always a safe space to bring up these kinds of feelings. Others were already primed for death and reaching out felt less… taboo.
“I want to be cremated, like Mum,” he’d said.
I’d nodded.
All Things Bright and Beautiful had just started rattling out its opening chords on the chapel’s state-of-the-art sound system- a late 90’s CD player- and there wasn’t time for discussion.
In and out. Done and dusted.
Next.
I picked up a potato, examining its slick, pale body. “No,” I said.
To be clear, this wasn’t some kind of matrimonial challenge. He wants this, so I want that.
No. I was not interested in some grand comeback, and I hadn’t been plotting this since examining yellowing bouquets, pretending to read the dedication cards, while watching the bouncer-cum-funeral director slowly move us on.
This was deeper than that.
“Good,” he replied. “As I know whatever happens you’d sprinkle me in the right place… With you.”
His words forced a tight-lipped smile.
The way I see it, we all end up in the ground one way or another.
That was my overriding thought. The one I wished to articulate before I started work on the Yorkshires. After I go, I want to be at one with nature. To me, the idea of roots and worms and creatures nesting within whatever remained of me wasn’t gross. It was comforting. Something from nothing.
We didn’t have kids. Not that a clew of worms would ever be a substitute. But if I could give back more than just the scratched marks on a donor card, I would.
Everything bar my pagan eyes.
I twisted round a pre-primed iPad, its hallowed glow odd against the effulgent afternoon sun.
Wicker caskets, beautifully weaved. Like picnic baskets for the dead.
“They’re… nice,” my husband said.
I was leading him in gently. I wondered if ancient man had once led their beloved to a hole, pointed in and banged their chest. It was such a specific kind of desire.
“What about this?”
His nose wrinkled at a shroud the same way it did at geometric-print wallpaper.
Two sets of trestle legs held up a body like a pasting table.
“Is that what you want?”
He leaned closer, pupils reflecting the future.
“I think so.” I knew so.
On holiday, I’m one of those people who enjoys a good jaunt around a cemetery. Not only is there something beautiful in the way they dissect a city, their history, their very essence explains more about people than any dog-eared history book. Grand monuments, mass plots, weeping angels, leering skulls… anthropology in action.
In the past, we turned the land from city to necropolis with beautiful efficiency. An eternal broken mirror. As above, so below. And below has been good enough for all my blue-collared progenitors.
He seemed unconvinced. “I don’t know how I’d feel about seeing your body like that.”
“I could literally go roll myself up in a bedsheet and do you a preview.”
“Come on,” he huffed, picking up a carrot. He turned on the tap and jet washed nonexistent dirt from its slender frame.
“But this is important. I need you to know. Either of us could go first, or we could go together, I just… I just need you to know what I want. I don’t want a tree with a plaque. I want a tree… growing out of me.”
From my heart, roots gripping bone.
My vacant skull grinning at the sun-moon-sun.
A mole buried in my ear and a warmth I could no longer see but feel… maybe through some cosmic link that never leaves us. There’s magic in the ground. Perhaps each body is a pin in a ley line. An intersection. A road. A fairy ring road. And the days, the years, the centuries turning… me to minerals and salts and eventually nothing, but that spot. That six foot of earth… my undying fingerprint… my soul. Right
there.
“I don’t want to think of you like that.” He dropped the carrot into the colander, where it rattled alone.
“Neither do I really,” I pushed up behind him, hands round his waist like the apron he refused to wear. It felt like I was sucking the warmth out of him. “Remember when we were in that museum, the one about the Punics? They cremated their dead, then placed them in pots and buried them. Everything goes back to the Earth. From dead things come green things. I’d be honoured if they planted your pot on top of me. Not lonely on a stone shelf. Not in a plot someone will forget. Wild. Unmarked. Call it a compromise.”
“You used to make your Dad bury the goldfish, didn’t you?”
“And?” I whispered, pressing my head against his back. His heart beat soft against my ear.
The average human takes 670 million breaths in a lifetime. As a child, I used to believe we had a finite amount, that if you held your breath it would add minutes onto your life… by not wasting them… by keeping them close to your chest. The little girl in me thought she had found a lifehack. My mother had found me blue.
I’d walked right up to the dry-stone wall separating life from death and found anyone could hop over it. Maybe that was why I needed the earth. A foundation. A beginning at the end.
My husband was still. A spider caught in a thread of time.
“I don’t actually have a comeback,” he finally admitted. “If it’s what you want, then I’m good.”
“Honestly?”
“I just want to be with you.”
“We won’t know we’re together.”
“Are you sure?” he said.
I loosened myself from him and promptly turned a length of potato peel into an impromptu moustache. I swirled it like a cartoon villain.
He snorted and set to work on carrot number two.
“Don’t ever change,” he said to my reflection in the kitchen window.
“I won’t,” I said.
Zoë Davis is a writer from Sheffield, England. She’s a stubborn FND sufferer and fights what her body says she can’t do by playing wheelchair rugby league. She writes poetry and prose, and especially enjoys exploring the interaction between the fantastical and the mundane, with a deeply personal edge to her work. You can find her words in publications such as: Ink Sweat & Tears, Strix, Roi Fainéant and Red Ogre Review. You can also follow her on X where she’s always happy to have a virtual coffee and a chat.
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