by Kale Hensley
When the Last Trumpet Sounds, I Will Be in the Mummy Room at the Museum
after Maria Rossetti, who said the opposite, presumably as a joke
As a pew-child, I kept my neck tilted up, up, up. Looking, waiting. That is how I saw that the shadows of chandeliers in a back-holler church looked like enormous spiders. That is how I found intimate kisses being shared in the ceiling spackle while I lie awake. That is how I learned the names of clouds and then forgot them (if their names rhymed, a girl would not forget them). I had to train, to prepare myself for the Lord’s impending rapture: the divine kidnapping that would weed out the holy amongst the burnouts (re: see lake of fire). Re: it is worse than East Lynn Lake, the first lake you ever visited. Re:member how your earthly father threw you in, to see if you could swim?
It is very normal to wonder which parts of you will make it up, up, up. When a girl gets raptured, does she appear in heaven in her prime or in her aged body, closer to pastry than flesh? Imagine, being raptured and you appear amongst the seraphim as a high schooler. Imagine, God singling out those four years as your prime (as some people on Earth tend to do). What a sick old man he is. Speaking of sick old men (sorry father, sorry Father), in the Middle Ages, there was ongoing debate about Christ’s foreskin. Yes, the crown of flesh before the crown of thorns. If the Son of God was circumcised here on Earth, then does he appear in heaven sewn back together? Does he appear in his entirety? What does that mean for us? For me?
Meetings were held, papers exchanged, fists raised. In truth, I do not think a conclusion about Jesus’ penis was ever reached. If anything, the discussions provoked more anxiety, especially for the holy. Every wannabe martyr showed up to the pub, glass weeping rings, groaning, “So if a man wants my finger as a relic, I’ll be deprived of it in paradise?” That is the intersection of high school girls and martyrs. During some stretches of life, you are distilled down to your body. Would it be much worse to appear in heaven only as a set of disembodied eyes? If we are lucky enough to be permitted, dare I say it, fingering in heaven, you’ll spend eternity blind. This is based on the assumption that most people would choose an eternity of pleasure over sight (I would).
As a girl, I was not only fascinated by my Christianity and the warm mints I plucked out of the pews, but by every explanation of what happened to us in Itsafter (this is what I have taken to calling the afterlife; it just falls off the tongue and into the collection plate). I recall borrowing a church friend’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not! book and finding the most intriguing passages about Egyptian mummies. In this holographic tome, they spoke of pharaohs, deprived of organs, surrounded by jewels, sent off to battle in their own version of Itsafter. Think about it: theirs is an admirable feat of self-preservation. You can memorize the moves without breaking a sweat: shrink your organs, remove the heart (a fickle hydrant), claypot the pinkeries that Nephelium cousins would mistake for bubblegum, then, lie still and unbothered as the first celestial dirt. An Itsafter where a girl got her body, her dog, her favorite cup, maybe a few friends (by choice, hopefully, but not always the reality).
Could it be blasphemy, my personal spidery shadow, that provokes me to this next confession? Should the rapture happen, like, actually happen, I want it to occur when I am in the mummy room at a museum. Listen, you can’t really hold up the line in the mummy room. Take it from someone who is always closest to the case. I’d be mouth-breathing on the glass, minding their business, transcribing illicit messages to them:
Did you really see your God?
What color was his G-string?
Who was the last person you danced with?
Can you recall a time when all you wanted was to be touched?
I’ve always found it strange, how we wane at what can remain, what can scream in vibrance: a trailing braid colored like the blood of the sun, a pharaoh’s mysterious golden tongue, rows of teeth that masquerade as truths, the solemn face we make when our lover awakes and finds us, finally, bored by the moon. I’d be so wrapped in the mimicry that I would hardly hear the sky fart, churn its delicates like a dryer living out its last days at a laundromat. Nervousness would finally take off its shirt. Out of my periphery, a sweet old woman would carve a cross into the air, trembling as if her hand was made of bees.
We’d hear it then, a polite tapping mistaken for a plague upon the glass. Ancient fists would spell out excuse me, how are you, what a pair of sensible shoes. Anyone who knows me knows I wear a pair of dirty Reeboks and succumb like butter to flattery. I would answer the mummies’ rappings with a stand back and haul the heaviest object in my bag: a chunk of lapis lazuli, slid to me over coffee by a friend the previous week. When she gave me the goddess stone, she said some voice had told her not to leave the house without it. Would a woman really be 21st century if she did not keep a crystal on her at all times. Not for manifesting, no, but for freeing mummies? The most beautiful song I could ever hear is shattering, a glass display becoming aware of its wings.
Like flies from a storybook, the mummies would step out, night-sockets drinking in the air conditioning, the tease of the LEDs, and several puddles of patron pee. I would remind those silly mummies don’t you all have somewhere to be and they would shrug, surprising me. Not really. I cannot say how I know this, but I just know they would perform the overlooked delicacies of the living: high-fives, nuzzling, hugs and brushes, fondling, kiss or two, footsy, more tongue, quivering, cries, for god’s sake, hush—should I mention that mummies dance like they do in memory, like they must do when we are all asleep. Each day, I am raptured. The first occurred when I was a girl. When I looked up, up, up and my imagination said, no, those aren’t chandeliers. Those are spiders.
Author Kale Hensley is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by trade. When he is not writing, he sidelines as a coffee shop medievalist. You can find more of his work in Lucent Dreaming and forthcoming in Image.
Artist Ellen June Wright is an American poet, photographer and painter with British and Caribbean roots. Her work has been published in Plume, Tar River, Missouri Review, Verse Daily and the North American Review. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.
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