Otherlight

Ian Hall

What’s between you & time
but a bail-bondsman? Reads the flyer

tacked to the bulletin
at the Baptist Church. I’vent got anything

sage to say to that. But I know enough to know some would
claim elsewise. After pap passed on, &

when it was too smarmy outside even
for a top sheet, my grandmother slept

with whatever slack fabric she had
handy—an apron front, limp shift, or the hound

toothed hem of a housedress—covering her face
entire. She thought this wiling

would convince Death or any other
malevolence that might’ve come

to recoup her that she was already
ghosted. & having seen her in deep

caul, I’d agree
that she looked only gently

sinewed to this world. More than once
my cousin and I stood over her

during the naps she took to endure
the crude things

afternoon did to her body. Let’s play
like we’re doctors: you smooth

the sheet, I’ll make the call. But, locomotively,
she drew breath, & I was too fixated

watching her gulp the same sunflower
embroidering off her apron over & over to see

to the postmortem. She sounded
like something that would make you regret

conducting a séance. The way she drooled
through the lean cloth, a murked-over window

into all that unlovely
personhood, simpled me. She had a candle

complexion. Her skin was complicated
as a harvest

sky. But that pigment was brief. How peaceably
it grayed—a solstice

of bruiseflesh
dozing into bone. & in the final year, I could only dread her

patient taper. The viral
quietus. Now, decades later, level

eyed, I try & recollect some of her
shrewdery: even if you can’t outfox Death

you might at least
puzzle him for a spell. Or so I tell myself

was the gist of her
phantoming as I bear down on this empty page

that’s like a white flag
I’m trying not to wave.

Ian Hall was born & reared in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, & elsewhere.