Semester of Death  | Suzanne Richardson

There was no professor.

We were students of death.

We wrote on the chalkboard: the ocean our first mother! Death our final father!

We studied dead languages. Our mouths strained to make shapes only the dead know.

We interrogated hourglasses. 

We looked at the lifespan of words, how they shed dead meanings, like the exaltation of cicadas jumping from bodies. Light outside the bulb.

We microscoped fungus and observed poisonous deaths asleep in its gills.

We went grave fishing and caught buckets of bone-nothing. 

We debated dead metaphors. Clocks. 

We sought out the oral histories of half-brown plants, When did death’s speck first visit? Horses laying in fields were interviewed, their last breaths pressed fresh into magnetic tape.

We looked to praying mantis to feel out where death was an opportunity.

We looked at spiders to see if death was a game. 

We photographed refrigerators for their decay-slowing secrets.

At midterm, we were tested on RUINATION

After exposure, how deeply is the velvet acremonium of death bearding on your tongue? Put your pencil

down when it reaches your throat.

Once a week we got up at dark and counted backward until dark’s death each day. 

We watched the way color is born on top of darkness. Crocuses guest lectured. 

We did primary interviews with total darkness on moonless, starless nights but it evaded our hardest questions about its relationship to death. It would never admit a connection. 

What about sleep!? we cried out.

We dictated the oral histories of insect exoskeletons left in ryegrasses, how it felt to be left behind. We titled them, “The Hollow Diaries.” How a body went missing from them so suddenly they were struck by nonexistence. 

 We looked to the infected for stories of invasion. How something gets in, how it explores and colonizes right before an absence of all feeling. A bombette firework of pain in the brain. 

We asked parasites how they liked drinking hosts down to their final breaths, but as it turns out parasites are life lovers, not death lovers. 

We built fires and starved them. Wore dead smoke in our hair for weeks as we revised the first-hand accounts of those angry hungry throbbing coals before the fire passes on. A rage-filled transition. 

We watched a turtle’s shell go soft. 

We watched a swan’s black mask grow over the live meat of its eyes. 

 We knelt down and listened to ice crack like salt crackers, we screamed as it melted.

The next week we did grief sleep workshops. 

We lay on cots packed with ice and shook until we cried. 

We cried until we became rocks. Eventually, we went catatonic as granite. 

We came back to the classroom only to read about monkeys. The way they touch each other’s wounds before they die as if to say “Why? What? Why?” 

Final papers collected on Luna Moths. Creatures with flecks of death born-in. Their mouths stolen by death before existence. Their fur already part ghost.   

We hoped our research might reach her death majesty, Winter.

But what did we know about good death? 

Until, one of us died. 

We witnessed death’s spontaneous art. 

The full-face theatre. 

No bows. 

No encore. 

A performance unlike any other.

No final meanings for us, death’s most studious pupils. 

We are waiting, we are looking for more words. 

Grade: We are passing, we passed.

Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is the writer of Three Things @nocontactmag and more about Suzanne and her writing can be found here: https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/ and here: @oozannesay