Invisible Women

Women & the Dead 2

Don’t be scared now, but the woman down the hall, she isn’t really alive. In fact, she’s not even a little bit alive, but no one moves her. No one lives with her, and her apartment is occupied, with her body, her corpse, that smell. The woman down the hall used to be called Alice, but now that she is dead, we don’t feel right using her name. We do it from time to time, on accident, which causes in us great flushing.

See, Alice has been dead for a decade and someone still pays the rent and someone asked the landlady not to disturb, do NOT disturb says her door, right over the number. The mailman has this place memorized and manages to cram the pages in. We imagine it is just her dead body in there, and an accruing mound of flyers and coupons. It would be much cheaper to buy her a coffin and just put her in the ground already, burn her up, but someone insists on keeping her there, in that room.

We do not know how she is posed, if she is lying down or sitting, how rigor mortis has weighted, gravity. Sometimes, we like to imagine walking in there, the stink and maggots, seeing her body, how much meat would remain, where bone would shine.

We don’t know what happened with her, what her story is exactly. We pretend to know, but even when she was alive, she was never one of us, keeping to loneliness. We don’t know, but we are sure it must be something sinister and her body’s well-being is important to us, not because we have reverence for the dead but because we care. We want good things, moral things, in our building at least, our homes.

But then we think maybe this is what Alice wanted, dead Alice, and we convince ourselves this truth, and so it wouldn’t be right to disturb her.

We sit guard by her door.

The stink of decomposition makes its way through the crack of her door.

On hot days, we can smell it in the garden.

On cold days, whiffs halt us in the foyer.

We are diligent in guarding her door though, just to make sure no one interrupts.

We learn to ignore the smell. Because this must be what she wants.