For the past week, you have seen my limp body on the way to work. You in your rumpled suit and panting on your bike, me in the grip of long-dried blood and puss. You have noticed the sad and yellow stuff that has dried under my nose, crusty in the Florida sun, the way I seem to be gagging up my tongue-- its heft is so far removed from my body that you can see the thick place where it meets the back of my mouth.

You felt bad for me at first, as a good man would. You saw the dead thing in the road and were sympathetic, thought of the live things still bounding about around you and mourned that I was not one of them. I was still clean, then-- there was only the noble scarlet of blood that swathed my body, the broken bone that shattered as ice would on impact, the sun still rifling

through my hair, reflecting off of it in golden threads. On the second day, you mentally scorn the faceless driver, the man that was not as good as you and thus did not get out and stand over me in mourning-- his own hair tumbling over itself in the morning breeze, his own suit not as sweat-stained as yours thanks to the air conditioning in his car. I would have gotten out, you tell yourself, I would have carried it to the grass. My hair was more matted, my blood now sticky in the heat. I felt the yellow stuff dripping from my nose. But I was still clean enough to pass your test of beauty, and thus I got your momentary sympathy.

On the third day, the smell hit you. I do not know how it punctured the rancid mist that surrounds you constantly-- you and your polyester suits-- but I had your attention now, the stink of me curling into the hollow of your skull. You could hear the faint buzzing of the flies that have taken up home in the crumbling temple of my body, the squelch of yet another tire crushing

into me. And you didn’t have a good night of sleep, you tell yourself later, because that must have been the only reason you thought what you next thought: Oh, when will somebody get rid of that thing already? You feel bad about this thought and you think on it for the rest of the day, over lunch with your coworkers and through a boring meeting in which you sketch a cat’s face on a post-it note. You go home to your sick girlfriend and you think on it some more while you scrape the bottom of a pot free from the charred-on onions. But, eventually, over a hot meal on the couch, you forget.

You wake up in a much better mood, and that mood persists until you bike past me--thinking again to the man that must have driven straight through me without hesitation. You again think that you would have done better. You again mourn for me behind the brow scrunched up in disgust, the lips lifting away from each other so as to not have to smell through the nose. And yet your grief is not the momentary thing it was on the first and second days-- it persists. So when you are falling asleep that night, you are thinking back to me, and my torn up body, relaxing on the cooling asphalt.

A gasp! Lungs sucking in air over and over and over again! The Miracle! The Miracle of life and air and lungs!

Your girlfriend shakes you to your senses. She tells you that you’ve been screaming. You can only focus on the images of the gnats gnawing away at your skin-- rubbing into your pores and-- oh god-- headlights in your face and long, long days rotting on the asphalt. You were hungry-- now you are scared, you are friends with the underbellies of cars, with the scavengers that peck and rip and tug at your flesh. You died facing the sky, and so you do not see but feel the bone of your limbs being unsheathed from meat. You had one-sided conversations with a man on a bike that never stopped.

You rush out of your apartment, still barefooted in your sleep-clothes. You get on that bike parked downstairs and pedal faster than you ever have to the road you have ridden past without stopping for the past five days. You stop. You look for the limp body. There are no street lamps. You can not make it out in the dark and so you walk out onto the road to look.

The last thing you see before the scream of headlights is a smudge of red on the asphalt. 

The body long gone.

04/06/2025