Hallowed Roses: A Micro-Anthology About Death

By Ophelia Vang

10 Stories by Ophelia Vang highlight mortality, morality, and the most intimate moments captured by death in this themed anthology.

1: Blooming Beelzebub: an ecosystem of death

2: Octopus: the perspective of the other side

3: Whiskey Neat: One man's experience with mourning

4: Death Tree: A little girl trapped in a rotten stump

5: Taro and Toad: A childhood story

6: Consumed: a struggle to satisfy his hunger

7: Pink Killer: a son's ghastly struggle

8: Fuck His Dad: The death of a relationship and the birth of a cocktail

9: Brie: living with dogs in the countryside

10: Final: the last curtain call of a performer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ophelia Vang
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215330722

Book preview

CONTENTS

About the Author

1 BLOOMING BEELZEBUB

I laid there on my cot. The smell of the straw pillow was made even more pleasant by the gentle breeze of the first whisper of autumn. They had moved me outside. I billowed an acute awareness of impending death, but the reason they had chosen to move me was that I had asked to be laid in the courtyard of the village. Its single story walls enclosed me in a luxurious stone casket on every side, and I felt closer to the life that buzzed around me each day. The breeze against my face aired my wounds and made them more tolerable, if only by the slightest increment.

As time went on and the softer parts of my face began to rot and fall off, my appearance would scare the children. My nieces and nephews who had once ridden my shoulders and shared meals with me now avoided the dark spot in the courtyard that had become my cot.

One day, after my sister had come to feed me porridge, I noticed a small bird resting beside me. The awareness that family members were refusing to take up the chore of spooning gruel into their best estimate of my mouth was almost lost in that sweet little bird. It sang a song to me as if expecting to start a nest on the branches

that had become a sickly me. After that, it flew away.

The next day, I awoke to an autumn breeze, a sweet scent of a straw pillow that reached me before the stench of my own illness, and a dead bird only a few feet from my head.

I felt first mournful. The sweet little bird that had helped me to break apart my day of watching fading leaves waver in their trees and rolling clouds as the sun passed and passed until it was night again had died.

I then felt envious. This bird had died while bearing no burdens to anyone. It was able to die, no matter how, without scaring children or causing a fight over who would feed it. Instead the bird died after bringing only joy. Was it more tragic? Or less? Perhaps it had been attracted to the death which loomed so near me the day before. Perhaps it had been caught up in death’s stench so much so that it, too, had fallen ill