I looked sideways, along the coast, where the water worked at the rocks it hadn’t changed yet. It reminded me of Jay’s profile pic, the similar shoreline on which they’d posed, dripping, and made the peace sign with their fingers. The thought of the image was comforting: Jay pixelating across my phone screen in eternal defiance of the bale-eyed boy in his Sunday best who would adorn mantels north of Algonquin. Nothing written in stone, nothing written in ink. Death hadn’t suddenly made Jay static; hadn’t suddenly pinned them down to any one thing. Under ground as above, they would remain unfinished: like Schrödinger’s cat, only consistent in the moment of viewing. Marco had simply been watching when I happened to blink. But now the coffin was closed, and no power on Earth could reopen it.
Yen Radecki was raised across three continents and is now based in Japan, where they teach English and write poetry and fiction in their spare time. Their writing has previously appeared in STORGY Magazine, Ibis House, and Baby Teeth Journal. Online, they can be found at @yenradecki.