My Untimely Death - Adam Peterson

Excerpt from My Untimely Death

Spring has come after the longest winter of my life so I lie in the hammock napping while the sun is out and the cicadas are singing and John Secada is singing on the small radio I carried out in my left hand while in my right hand I carried a pink lemonade which rests on my sternum wetting a cold circle on my polo, and it is all perfectly spring until everything gets ruined by my untimely death.

My deaths falls from the sky. At first a dark shadow that might be a cloud, the sun never breaks it. Shade is not spring so, upset, I open my eyes to see a block of what appears to be lead falling toward me. This is not spring, but I close my eyes to it and think how happy I am that a block of lead is not winter either.

This is what it feels like to die: like throwing away a letter; building a diorama; hating someone you spend time with; eating your favorite meal on consecutive days; flipping over a blank page in a photo album; the band Bad Company; sleeping next to a dog; buying an expensive pen; seeing a cousin unexpectedly; sampling a taste of your baby’s food; aiming a pellet gun; cooking your first meal for one; being late to a job interview.

Dying feels like other things too. To me it feels like a nursery rhyme I try to remember. It is as if I know this death from somewhere. It was not always a block of lead in the spring. Like all things, I imagined death many ways. It just as easily could have been cobalt, car crash, summer, stab, or more cobalt.