Where You Will Go After Dying
By Seth Wade
Today you’re an anglerfish far down at the bottom of the sea: gullet ribbed with needles, bulging pale moons for eyes creeping close like hungry satellites. No one sees you in the dark, only your shine. A lure is so much easier. Dangling light like fruit, away, where you can see them coming, where they can’t even get a nibble in before you’ve swallowed them whole—
but by tonight, you’re anchovies. Packed in a sealed tin, everything’s too hot & you can’t breathe, but for some reason that’s okay. You’re not alive but not dead, & at any second you know you’ll hear the scraping roar of your metal sky cracking open, followed by the flood of too much light, blinding—
like the searing halt you’ve come to now: nothing but dried worms stickered on the hot morning pavement, lost beneath an endless shine, flushed out too far by the rainwater.
Seth Wade is a tech ethicist studying and teaching at Bowling Green State University. You can read his fiction and poetry in publications like Hunger Mountain Review, Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, HAD, Apparition Literary Magazine, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Gateway Review, The Cafe Irreal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and now BAM Quarterly. His work is also forthcoming in hex. You can follow him on X: @SethWade4Real or Instagram: @chompchomp4u