The woman sitting next to me on the bus is holding her dead dog. It is a wrinkled, whiskered mutt with white glassy eyes and a face that somewhat resembles her own. She holds it tightly, protectively, like a baby. As I watch, the dog leaps forward then recoils back, over and over and over. Its legs kick and flutter, springing it onto her lap, strained and spittle-mouthed, and then in the next moment it is lying back in her arms, like it is sleeping.

A tall, crooked-nosed man stands near the door, the chopped halves of a salmon wriggling in a plastic bag at his side. He is gathering nasty looks from the other passengers. When the bus hits a curve in the road, the salmon flutters and sways, scales glittering even through the plastic skin. It could almost be mistaken for a living thing. I watch the salmon and the dog dance together, alive and dead and still kicking, kicking, kicking.

I disembark about a block away. The air is warm and humid from recent rain, a cloud hanging about my shoulders as I trudge home, T-shirt plastered to my chest like a laminate. My parents’ house is celebrating its centennial next year, and it takes three tries before the back door shudders open.

The lights are all out on the first floor. I turn to the wooden chair on my left, crammed into the shallow, dusty alcove between the door and the tiled bathroom. “Good afternoon, Dad.”

My father’s face is crumpled in a scowl, right hand caged over his heart. He tilts forward, slowly at first and then all at once, before he pitches out of his chair and hits the hardwood. This is how we found him, five years ago. This is how he has remained ever since. Frowning, clutching, keeling over. Frowning, clutching, keeling over.

“How are you?” I murmur to him. “Class went well. I missed you.” He falls to the floor with a whump and a wheeze of thin air in response.

“Don’t talk to him,” my mother says, sharply, from the top of the stairs. Her shadow looms down the hallway and into the kitchen, a creeping darkness. It was her idea to keep him here by the door, where he would not be in the way. Even the floorboards below his chair are stained from years of never-cleaning, because she will not let me get close enough to keep his resting place swept or washed.

She’s waiting for another five years to pass, when he’ll legally be dead instead of this flickering, pulsing, haunting thing in our hallway. A ghost still inhabiting the skin of her husband’s body. After five more years, when he is a decade dead, we can collect on his insurance and have him committed away to a storage facility, a loud and panicked place full of the cycles of death repeating and echoing and howling their final moments out through the walls. Most occupants are frozen in moments of horror unwitnessable—burning, drowning, bleeding out, being stabbed, shot, strangled. Sometimes they are wheeled out to serve as evidence in court, but most never leave their cubicles. It is a place where things go to be at unrest forever.

A handful of months after he died, we held a funeral for him. His body bucked inside the coffin; I remember the deadened thump of his shins striking hard against the wood. There was blissful silence in the car ride home, save for my mother’s weeping. Afterwards, she abandoned his ghost beside our back door like a shed snakeskin and decided that he was really, truly gone instead of what he is: a record skipping, skipping, skipping.

“Right,” I say, as I wipe my shoes on the mat. “Good afternoon, Mom.” When I leave the hallway I feel his eyes on me, blinking watery and greyish like the bulging gaze of a dead fish.

Tonight, on the news: a man fell into an industrial woodchipper in northern Alberta, and when they scraped his pieces out of the gears, they found that the fragments remained motionless mush. He is the first person to die cleanly, without even one repetition, in many years. It’s like he has no soul at all.

Scientists are talking again about the exact point of partition where the fragmented body stops repeating. They take the bodies of death row prisoners and chop them up into tinier and tinier pieces until they can confidently say that the body stops moving when it is separated into pieces 1/64th of its original size. It is such a nice, even number, and I roll it around my head for hours afterwards, even as dawn peeks over the horizon with searching eyes.

The Pope puts out a statement—your soul goes to Heaven or Hell when you die, regardless of your body’s movements. Even as your mortal body remains twitching in your chairs or your deathbeds or your woodchippers, you turn up at the pearly gates. There is no soul housed within the defunct, fleshy shell you leave behind, even if it makes a convincing pantomime of living. It is a husk. This comes at great controversy: Some Catholics support burying their glitching dead deep underground, while others maintain that you must place them somewhere safe and visible, in case they ever do come back to life. Others, still, say that the dead have been half-raptured and we should grind their bodies into pulp to finish the job. My mother is indecisive on the matter. She paces in front of the TV, biting an anxious hole in the centre of her lip.

Nobody grieves the man in the woodchipper. He is a martyr for our learning, sacrificed so the rest of us might live on knowing a little more about ourselves. His family does not have a body to bury, even if they wanted to.

Downstairs I hear him, seizing, crumbling, falling down. It is like the hum of the refrigerator or the microwave, a distant, static sound that crackles faintly in the background. For months after he died, I could barely sleep—still haunted by the sound of his breathing. His wheezing, failing body crept up the stairs and slid over the threshold into my room, his death sticking to me, cloying, desperate, trying to steal my warmth. Delirious and half-awake, I found myself wishing he would just go through with it, so the rest of us could rest.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I am glad he is still here. His presence keeps my grieving dull and half-hearted, which is how I prefer it.

The house shakes slightly when he lands, even though his body has very little weight to it. Putting your foot out to stop him does nothing but bruise your shins as he bounces off and hits the floor, puddling, a remnant of a man. Nothing can mute the sound of his dying. My mother tells me to ignore it, to make it a rhythm, to dissipate it entirely. I try. I hum tunelessly as I cook dinner, to drown it out, to harmonize with his stuttered breath.

One month after we start dating, Kris requests that we stop meeting up at my place.

“I can’t focus,” she says, with a pained expression. “I’m sorry, but I can’t, not with … with …”

What she cannot say in words she says with a plaintive gaze and crooked frown. Her thick eyebrows furrow together until they smear in the middle, and I am struck with remorse for bringing her into my morbid house with its distant, ugly music. I have forgotten that death is still foreign and horrible for most people, for people who aren’t used to witnessing it happening alongside their downstairs bathroom and their open-plan kitchen and their back doormat.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I take her hand, hold it tightly. Her rings knock against mine like wind chimes. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I gather up my disappointment while she locates her boxers where they have fallen and gotten lodged between the bed frame and the wall. On the way out we have to pass him. His shadow lurches forward like it’s reaching for us. In my peripheral I see Kris screw her eyes shut, her shoulders tensed and subtly shuddering. To me, he is just a memento hidden away in the alcove, like someone else might keep an urn or a portrait. He is just my father. But I like Kris, with her uneven smile and ragged buzz cut and uncommon fondness for me, so I let it go.

From then on, we only ever meet at her apartment or elsewhere—the arcade, the cafe, the Thai take-out place near our university—because my house is all coloured and fogged with the sound of his dying. It seeps through the walls and bleeds under shut doors like a guilty conscience or a ticking clock.

There are ways now to kill animals so that their bodies come out looking like they are sleeping, just as still and motionless as corpses were before. Cows, chickens, pigs, they all die silent. Perhaps this nightmare was made for them, to force our world to learn how to kill them kinder. No more slaughterhouse bolts to the forehead, no more broken necks. The general consumer doesn’t like meat that twitches and bucks on the grill.

Never fish, though. The fish refuse to die still and motionless—they writhe and thrash, they kick, they flutter, until the seafood aisle of the supermarket is a beating, gnashing symphony of small repeating deaths.

I stopped eating fish and my mother followed soon after. Canned tuna sales went way up, where the squirming was down to a minimum and the body’s rituals were barely visible at all. The sushi restaurant near my house pivoted towards an emphasis on prawn tempura and imitation crab and cucumber rolls. My aunt started serving her steamed fish chopped into very small pieces, so small it didn’t look like fish anymore, even when the uncles voiced their loud protest.

It never bothered my father. Chew it well, that’s all. If you didn’t care before, then why do you care now? It’s dead already. It just pretends to be living, to trick you. To make you think that’s what it is.

I am beginning to see the resemblance between us. When I was born, I was black-haired and black-eyed. Now all of me is slowly lightening to match him. His body in the alcove is better than any photograph to compare myself against—I look in the mirror and see these very same eyes rolling back and fluttering closed as he plummets to the ground, his heart stopping in midair. I study him while he’s falling, looking for the parts that are the same. I have the bow of his mouth, the wispy eyebrows, the uneven front teeth.

My short hair only worsens our uncanny mirroring, but growing it out makes me very sad and quiet, so my mother no longer asks me to. Sometimes she catches my eye through the darkened hallway and her lips part on a gasp, or a question. She is seeing double. Perhaps she thinks I am him, finally gotten up from that chair, finally proved my right to the land of the living. I see the way her eyes well with tears, I see the hand that flies to her rosary. My body might as well be rotting, clouding over, filling up with death until I am ripe and bursting.

I come into the habit of smiling, when my mother and I make eye contact. A reflexive, stilted, simple smile, the kind my father never wore. It wedges open our differences, makes them obvious. When I step blindly out into the road with my chunky headphones on, a yellow light beaming down like a warning, I smile widely in case I am struck by a passing car. I hold the smile until I reach the opposite concrete shore—if I am killed here, if this is the moment I will wear forever, then I want to look like a photograph my mother would be proud to frame, rather than something stumbling, shameful, gasping, croaking, doubling over. I want to be something she would keep close.

There’s a service you can order through the hospital to arrange your death in a way that is peaceful and still, so close to corpse-like that you might be mistaken for one if not for the soft rise and fall of your breathing. They slide a needle into your wrist while you sleep, your eyes fluttered shut and your mind dreaming of soft latex gloves, and they turn you into something to be wrapped up in silk and carried home, embalmed by time rather than formaldehyde.

There are other methods. If you know you are dying, you can go down to the beach and set up a little diorama to live inside for your final moments. Settle down with the warm sand prickling under your palms. Watch the fish jump and scatter. Watch the sun sink below the water. Wait for your time to run out. Laugh and smile to increase your chances of being captured like this: radiant and alive. When your family drives down to get you, they can pick up your flickering, echoing, stuttering ghost and bring you home to decorate the mantle or the guest bedroom or the attic.

You can be a photograph or a postcard. You can sit on your beach towel and laugh, smiling bright as the setting sun, beautiful forever.

Kris was a vegetarian before the echoes, but her parents are still stumbling through a transitional period. Tonight they have prepared a tofu steak, oozing water and oil where it hasn’t quite been grilled all the way through. It feels like the kind of meal they prepare for guests but would not eat otherwise. Her mother apologetically calls it an experiment but despite its half-finished texture, the marinade smells rich and well-seasoned in a way that makes my mouth swim. It is my first dinner with them, and I am eager to please.

They dole out even portions of steak and rice and sauteed vegetables for the four of us, mother, father, Kris, and I. Anxious, I glance back towards the living room where Kris’s grey-haired grandmother is still sleeping in her leather armchair.

I catch Kris by the sleeve of her patchy jean jacket as we file out of the kitchen. “What about paati?” I ask. Kris stares at me like I’ve sprouted gills.

“Paati’s dead,” she hisses. Her gaze darts to her parents, as if afraid they will overhear. “That’s her echo.”

I look back in shock. Now I see the signs: the way her breathing stutters when she hits the end of the loop. The way her eyes are always fluttering on the edge of being closed. Still, she must have died so quietly, so barely-dead at all. Hours ago, Kris introduced her to me in a whisper. At the time I had thought she was just sleeping. I thought Kris was speaking softly so as not to wake her—but there is nothing to wake.

My gaze stays on the body of Kris’s grandmother throughout dinner. My back is to the wall, and I can see her through the gap between Kris’s mother’s and father’s chairs. She hovers between them like a ghost or a marble white-haired Mary, the kind my mother keeps on the mantle. Her eyes are nearly shut, a glimpse of milky sclera shining through like the beam of a lighthouse, and her lips sometimes part on a breath, or maybe a question.

The family eats and makes gentle conversation and yet I am fixated on the room over, where two withered hands lie quietly on their leather armrests, a thumb softly moving back and forth. I swear she is watching me. Terror feels like a knife against my sternum, precise and impersonal.

“Pass the rice, please,” Kris says, and I turn away. I try to focus on the warm plate in my hand, Kris’s fingers brushing against mine on the sweating underside of the ceramic—but if I strain, I can hear her grandmother’s shaky lungs, rattling, whistling, breathing their last.

Today, I come home from class and my father isn’t by the back door. I search the whole first floor before I hear him faintly—the muffled whump and groan, the sound of his heart stopping, the faint pausing of his breath—through the floorboards.

The basement is cobwebbed thickly like it is resisting entry. I brush their cloying strands aside and aim my phone’s harsh flashlight at the stained carpet in the centre of the room, where a sheet covers what is left of my father. I watch him fall to the ground, then spring up again, over and over and over. With the lights off, he is a sheet ghost. A hostage. A decoration. The basement door closes behind me.

We eat dinner in complete silence, save for the sound of his distant, muted dying. Mary watches from the mantle. My mother mouths towards the salt and I pass it to her, witnessing the way her hands shake when she takes it from my own trembling fingers.

I don’t think I ever saw my father laugh.

I board the bus with a frozen cut in a plastic bag. The halves of the salmon move like they are still slipping through the water, which brings me consolation. They died alive, flashing through the current like a knife, their eyes bright and glowing under the sun.

Tonight, they thaw in the refrigerator, shards of ice crackling as the body gently twists from side to side. I wait with my back to the oven, head pressed against the glass, until the halves are fresh and mobile again. On the cutting board I cube the swaying body, carding its pieces into hot rice and green onion. I am too tired to wait longer for a marinade, so I pour a quick sauce over the bowl, douse it in sesame seeds, and wipe up the flecks that splash across the counter. Against the ceramic, the pink-orange cubes dance for me, still enacting, still performing. I am almost convinced. Almost tricked.

My mother watches from the doorway but says nothing.

It is still wriggling, twitching, as I lift it to my mouth and bite down. Salty, too ocean-like, too much soy sauce. The fish in my bowl is dreaming of the sea. I chew it well, until it is mashed apart and separated, until its frantic pieces come to rest, until the ghost is loosened from the body and laid to sleep forever. Then I swallow. Underneath me, my father falls from his chair, sheet-covered and still dying, dying, dying, over and over again.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Ashlee Lhamon

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors