Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me 

—Spring and All, William Carlos Williams 

The Dead Man has a locust in his skull. Sometimes it is as loud as a delivery van. It keeps him up at night, it is with him when there is nothing else, buzzing like the radio station his father would listen to while he got ready for work at dawn. There were times that his father existed as little more than that sound of radio chatter and advertising jingles and old songs, a constant in the apartment at a certain time of day, before the radio was switched off, followed by stomping down the hallway and the slam of the front door.

The chirping of the locust is an itch he cannot scratch but also cannot do without, not now.

The Dead Man was born on a Tuesday in late Spring. The rain that day was torrential, though mother and baby were not aware at the time. They were both told afterwards, always, repeatedly. Eventually, the Dead Man’s mother began to remind him of the rain on that day, again and again, though she herself had not experienced it. She said: it rained all day and all night, the whole time I was in labour, it’s all the doctors and nurses could talk about. And that was true. The Dead Man would nod at this story, his sister too, the whole family nodding. It rained for days, weeks, flooding the streets and the alleys and our lungs. It is still raining even now.

…

Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of two books, the short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father and 926 Years with Kyle Coma-Thompson. Midnight Grotesques, with Michelle Lynn Dyrness, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.