A Long Search

They didn't have death in their eyes, or in their ears, or in their hands. There was no discernible evidence they had it in their hearts, either. It may have been in their clothes, for the majority of these were devised through the pulping of animal parts; but these were deaths of a certain distance, that they could take on and off. On their bedroom floor these items could be found imitating their prior forms, crumpled in piles like sloughed skins.

They did not have death in their hair, though it was, they knew, composed of dead matter. Instructional: such accouterments of personal fashion, freely given for cutting, styling, and dyeing, were made possible by the regenerative functions of the genetically insuppressible scalp above their brains.

Some did go bald, but this also could not be counted as a kind of death. Merely the evolution of hidden instincts towards their final flower, ironically, in this case, denuded of petals.

No death in their mouths, that could be heard or tasted. Investigations by deep explorative kissing turn up no sour graveyards under the tongue. In fact, these would be the furthest from such places.

Some of these even sucked upon the florid Achtung of a phallus, or groveled juicily for a flick upon a clitoris, but it should be said, even then, when they reemerged, they only had smiles to show for it.

Was there death in their manners? There were so many different species: the I-Have-Some, the I-Have-Yours, I-Have-None, I-Have-All. Though surely it would stand to pass that death could be found in a few of these, it was a big sociological surprise none were. True to advertising, these were more modes of survival, some polite, others more makeshift and malleable.

Was there death in their differences between each other? Here, yes, was something less immediately identifiable to their individual person, something less evident when any one of them were isolated at the end of a single finger, pointing.

But no, not even that was the case. Variations of skin, size, language, group norms, assumptions, even genital orientation and predilection, were merely contrasts in a riotous continuum of sameness. Each at best an animal pulled from their mother. An event, it should be stated, as contra to the vacuum shuck of death as house cats are to purposeful dieting.

Was death in their expectations, though? Could it ride down into them so seamlessly and so subtly? Reports say: it wasn't, couldn't. Was in the things they made? Was it in those grids of collective convenience and purpose the finely-grained among them termed "consumer confidence" or "ideology"? A considerable shock to not find it there, either.

Was it in the past, or their feelings about the past? Was it in that artesian well of time coursing up through space, always insisting "here-now, here-now"? Or surely, in the inconceivable nowhere, nowhere, of the future?

As much as could be discerned, from cruising the fluid vagaries of passage in a body across expanses of duration, no, death was neither an agent or a direct negotiator of these.

It was pointed out that it was a faithful byproduct of them, but this couldn't be said to be true of each of them, each in their own, different pasts, different futures, but one time moving elaborately out of sync with itself, depending upon their location and distance from other forms of time, in space.

In short, death was not where they were, or who they were, or when.

But perhaps, it was asked, it could be found in the how and the why?

These couldn't be correctly searched for, isolated, identified for purposes of careful scrutiny. Nor could they be touched, poked, conceived of, abstracted from, nor subjected to a repeatable process of analysis. They could not be kissed, nor put through trials of sex or punishment or extreme abject acquisitions of knowledge to the detriment of personal relations to others and oneself. They could not be sold, nor fashioned into weapons. They could not be minted into a form of currency. They could not bring stillborns or ancient children in their sickbeds back to health. They could not get famous, nor render one famous by association. They could not confer notoriety, nor transform losers into winners, nor magnify the merriness of each creaturely self. They could not be loved into explicit existence, nor, in turn, hated out of it. They weren't, in the end, really even aspects of a question, though for several millennia this has not stopped people briefly in terror or wonder to ask them.

There was no death, it would seem, about them. Only questions.

Whereas answers, they heard, were things in themselves.