The Dead Come For Me
The dead come for me now.
It started a few weeks ago.
From the 1st Avenue bus, I see my mother in the aisle of CVS in her cotton housecoat.
Then I turn over in my bed one night and there is my ex-husband.
They won’t leave me alone.
This has gone on for days.
I see my father in a group of homeless men on 23rd street.
The girl in my senior homeroom who died in a car crash forty years ago is riding a scooter in Peter Cooper Village.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep for the dead.
They keep breaking into my dreams.
I go in the kitchen and there they are, some sitting at the kitchen table, others leaning
against the wall, drinking all my cheap wine.
I go into the living room.
My sister is sitting in my chair.
She’s five years old.
She doesn’t look at me.
I can tell she’s angry that I’m not dead.
She’s too young to know how hard it is.
To be the one who lived.
The one who wasn’t wanted.
My mother comes into the room and takes her hand.
And my father takes the other.
I expect them to float through my front door.
They open it.
The dead in the kitchen stand up, push back chairs.
“Don’t leave me alone,” I say.
My uncle is the only one who speaks.
Just before he’s gone, he says,
“You always were.”
Cynthia Webb, author of No Daughter of the South, has had a checkered past full of interesting and unlikely jobs. Now she is a happy educator. She explores the implications of being a queer Jewish Southerner-in-exile and everything else that comes up in this strange world here.
