{"id":7146,"date":"2016-04-06T15:52:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T21:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7146"},"modified":"2016-04-06T15:52:13","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T21:52:13","slug":"everything-that-matters-in-life-and-death","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7146","title":{"rendered":"Everything That Matters in Life and Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Allen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why would anyone really experiencing a matter of life or death call the 911 center — where we save the world one call at a time — and say \u201cWe\u2019re experiencing a matter of life or death\u201d? These people scream something like \u201cOh fuck! My baby!\u201d and \u201cBlood! Blood! Everywhere!\u201d Not \u201cWe\u2019re experiencing a matter of ya-dee-ya\u201d. The caller didn\u2019t even request assistance or give me an address. It popped up on the screen; that\u2019s how they found this matter of life or death, which by the time they got there was only the latter.<\/p>\n

If the caller had screamed for dear life or screamed in the throes of death — if she\u2019d screamed — I\u2019d be able to file this one away, but her calm alto dogs me, like a serial killer after she\u2019s taken selfies with the splattered walls and placed the polished cleaver back into the knife drawer.<\/p>\n

My dreams are all matters of life or death now, which, according to the company psychologist, are unresolved<\/em> matters of life or death: when life becomes more dying than living, whether the release of dying is worth all this trouble. That kind of stuff. The company psychologist has a reputation for being a whiny existentialist. How, I ask him, can the dreams of a 911 operator be about anything but death? I don\u2019t call death; death calls me<\/em>. Every night now.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m manning an old-fashioned operator\u2019s board. It\u2019s lit up like Christmas in Alabama. I can\u2019t reach the cables. My hands are tiny and blue. I\u2019m a mouse. A blue one. One by one, the lights fade, the board ices over. A woman whispers, “We\u2019re experiencing a matter of life or death.”<\/p>\n

Someone’s dying and dying and dying. I\u2019m needed. Four hundred tiny mouse claws crawl over my body. The mice scream-squeak \u201cWe are experiencing a matter of life or death!\u201d I can\u2019t move, but my mind wheezes for help as the air thins and the mice fall dead, their hands limp but claws protracted, keening like mourning mothers.<\/p>\n

I have the honor of giving the eulogy for each mouse who sacrificed its life in last night\u2019s dream. Colonies have died trying to wake me, to save the world one call at a time. My task tonight is to try to express, in hundreds of individually intimate ways, why life matters.<\/p>\n

I cower, overshadowed by a statue of a blue mouse in some Old World square. The mouse is portly, made of hard plastic. His nose is cast to twitch, sniffing for the food he can\u2019t possibly have: he\u2019s bolted to the ground. He\u2019s not a warrior or a king; he\u2019s a gaudy eyesore still-life, a monument to the ridiculous absurdity<\/em> of life. My<\/em> life. And because no one is paying attention to anything I say or do, I climb onto his fat blue hard-plastic back and proclaim this big blue mouse to be everything that matters in life. And death.<\/p>\n

CHRISTOPHER ALLEN<\/strong> is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O\u2019Type (a Satire).<\/em> His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Eclectica Magazine<\/em>\u2019s 20th<\/sup>-Anniversary Best of Speculative<\/em> Anthology, Night Train, Indiana Review<\/em> and others. Allen is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly<\/em> and lives in Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Allen Why would anyone really experiencing a matter of life or death call the 911 center — where we save the world one call at a time — and say \u201cWe\u2019re experiencing a matter of life or death\u201d? These … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":7136,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7146","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-1Rg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7153,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7146\/revisions\/7153"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}