Vanessa German: The Insurance Salesman Visits the Road of Corpses

These kids are killing me wit alla their talk of death. yesterday a cue line at the arthouse n a trio of dead uncles shot n kilt. cousins fake cousins mama’s boyfriends. n then funeral talk of haircuts caskets n the visitation drama of sighs and mama cain’t take it no more. and your kids are repeating alla these things as though they have seen it on tv. or deeply ingested it immediately into their long term and lifetime generative memory a very deep place of remembering remembering lifetimes before the corpse road in sierra leone. or a land that had another name that perhaps waz justa moan and a song. the given monicker of somebody’s grandma. back before there waz the language. french dutch or even the notion of talking. your children are repeating your sighs. they are lining up in the quiet of the arthouse and beseeching moments of reverence for every lost person they ever knew. once standing upon their front porches and then gone to the casket and visitation room at white’s or gooden’s or wherever the church fund cd afford. and one day this man from an insurance company stopped by the arthouse. this wide-shouldered and big beautiful man wit sad bright eyes. and he says to me in a sideways not-even-supposed-to-really-say-outloud sorta way listen he says if you git a chance to mention to people the idea of life insurance as in the funeral as in the costs of final expenses. please do he says sort of shyly. he says when a child dies at 17 or 25 no one really thinks about these things. no one really says hmmm a fund for my son. but perhaps you cd mention it because the funeral directors they are getting rich. and there is always this moment at the coroner’s office or 2 days after the street corner memorial has gone full skirt in flowers n teddy bears that the cold hard cash of the situation comes to roost on a kitchen table somewhere. and that is a hard and bad thing he says. perhaps you’ll you know mention this to some of the mother’s that you know. and it may i don’t know sorta act as a kinda preventative medicine. i said ummm. and then he came back to his senses and made full eye contact and found a language with which to sweep that last few moments under the rug. he handed me his business card and said if you think about it just here take this and i never saw him again.

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Copyright 2015 Vanessa German