It’s very deathy, someone said.

We were speaking of a story we’d just heard. The word made me think of its opposite: life-y. Which brought to mind buttery, juicy. Then fruity and meaty.

Everyone turned to lighter tales. I was left thinking of you. Earthy came to me next: had the soil been sandy or loamy? Dank down in there, had it been?

No gravestone yet, I’ve been told; just an image of you and some flowers. A photo taken last year, when we stood in Cremona’s Piazza del Duomo, faces tilted upward, as Paola snapped picture after picture, trying to keep you among us… The sky capacious; sunny your usual weather, though sometimes you clouded over. And cry, you did cry. But mostly you laughed.

You knew what would come, yet you stayed blue-skied. How? Tell me how to be hearty and deathy at once. I’m listening—tell me.

Martha Cooley is the author of The Archivist, a national bestseller, and Thirty-Three Swoons (both published by Little, Brown). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a member of the English Department at Adelphi University.