by Hajer Requiq

Playtime With My Daughter

after William Evans

Too many things have died on their way to my body. I have seen light trudge its way toward me like a death march. Even the sun cannot make it to my skin. There is a gathering of the dead in my blood. I laugh. I do not mind it. I am the largest ghost among them, after all. I haven’t worn a corpse in years; it fits. From the corner of the room, my daughter comes hurtling. She catches me shovelling cremains from my ears and nostrils. She wants to pull up my shirt, press her loose fist to my stomach. She doesn’t know that’s where I store my spare headstones. She doesn’t know that’s where I keep all the dead away from her. I am still adjusting to the graveyard bulging out of my chest. My body is an elegy I have made sure she never hears. My daughter is only five. Her face is the only sun that doesn’t dodge me or clot into concrete on my skin. So, I fall to the ground, squirming through skeletons. I let her poke me. There is a wealth of shadow in each bone. She volunteers to pluck all the dying things from my skin like ingrown hair, pick at the full-sized ghosts in my beard. And when she trips over a tomb between my ribs, she starts asking all these questions. I lie; I am not a bouquet of claws waiting for something to clutch, or rip a heartbeat or a prayer from. I haven’t been read obituaries instead of bedtime stories as a child. I haven’t been assigned an epitaph for a name at birth. I haven’t chewed at the very thing that tried to kill me over and over again —  I am alive. For you. I will be. Always. Even when most of my body cannot remember how.