Emailing the Dead

Using the ubiquitous communication technology to momentarily transect the veil between worlds.

When someone you know dies, email them immediately.

Don’t mention their demise. Say hello. Ask a favor.

Don’t overthink it. Don’t write a poem. They won’t receive it.

No one will hear the coconut thud on the sand

of the island in the sun, which is the apex of a mountain

descending all the way down to the seafloor: this monument

of messages the dead may have actually read while alive.

In time, your email will be buried under infinite coconuts to come:

spam plummeting eternally out of the bent palms of modernity

for as long as the internet lasts. But before that, your little coconut

just might get skimmed by some grief-stricken survivor

assigned to tidy up the dead person’s accounts. This reader

believing as they scan it that your message was meant

for the person they lost, holds open a portal, possibly

to the dead themselves, with their surviving eyes and the pieces

of the dead they still hold inside them, wisps of identity

and history all vaguely braided in the bereaved

beholding now your text of imperfect communion.

No hello closer to silence was ever commissioned.

To the smithereens of the deceased still vibrating in the survivor

this almost-no-mana is so much more mana than none

in the same way a penny measures more than a briefcase

full of hundreds of thousands, or a bank account worth millions

for being so much closer to none without being none,

not yet. All by itself, without breaking a sweat

the smallest fraction of the smallest number imaginable

holds back the wall of the zero. Hello too small to fail.