I Write For The Dead, But They’ve Started Writing Back.
By Ṣobowale Oluwadarasimi
The first time it happened, it felt like a coincidence.
A woman in a plum dress came to see me on a Wednesday. She smelled of violet pastilles and old secrets. Her husband had died in his sleep, she said. Peacefully. So she wanted something “sensitive, but not sentimental. Literary, if possible.” That was the word she used. Literary.
She brought me a box of his things; a pocket watch that no longer ticked, an ashtray with his initials etched in cursive gold, and a single cufflink. But there was no photograph or voice recordings. I always asked for those, but she shook her head like they were sins she had already buried. So I built him out of suggestion, ash and implication. I wrote a eulogy that made grown men tremble in the third pew, and had his dentist sobbing into a silk handkerchief.
Then the article came out two days later. But it was not an obituary, it was a police bulletin.
A man with that same name. Found in the woods. Not asleep, not peaceful. No box of belongings, no ashtray. But there was the same pocket watch, and it was bloodied.
The thing that haunted me most wasn’t the cause of death which was blunt force trauma to the temple, but the wording of the article. "He died with time in his hand." I’d written that line. Exactly that line.
By the third time, I’d stopped believing in accidents. I began to keep a ledger. I underlined the names that were given to me, and the names that appeared in crime reports. I began to listen for tremors in the voice of the bereaved. Not grief, but fear. Guilt. Calculation. It was as though someone was hiring me not to remember, but to erase. Or worse, to write the truth before it happened. That was the thing. The timing was always wrong. I was asked to write about deaths that had not yet occurred. And somehow, my eulogies came true.
I tried to tell myself it was merely style. Coincidence. The way I repeated myself across clients, recycled phrases, built metaphors out of ordinary things: rain, broken clocks, wet shoes at the door. But then I wrote about a boy who “died chasing thunder,” and two days later he was found electrocuted on an abandoned train track during a lightning storm. There was no witness. Just my voice echoing in the news anchor’s mouth.
The police don’t believe in lyricism. They believe in fingerprints and motives. I had no motive. Still, I stopped writing for a while, and told clients I was on a retreat. I deleted my website and ignored all referrals.
But they kept coming. They left notes under my door and kept mailing me boxes of personal effects. Once, someone slid an envelope into my coat pocket on the subway. It was a poem about a man who hadn’t died yet, with a date and time scribbled in the margin. It’s tomorrow.
Now I sit at my desk at 2:13 a.m., the lamp casting long shadows across a sheet of cream paper. I’ve sharpened a pencil to a dangerous point. There’s an open box on the floor beside me. Inside it, there’s a silk tie, a notebook with the first three pages ripped out, and a set of keys to a car registered in no state I can identify.
I haven’t opened the manila folder yet, but I know it holds the photograph. They always wait until the fifth time. There’s a letter, too. It says only this: “Write him into silence.”
I stare at those four words until they stop meaning anything, and then I write the first sentence of his eulogy: He was a man who knew how to disappear without leaving. I don’t know if I mean it as praise or warning. I don’t know if the man is dead, or about to be, or if by writing I have ensured it. I used to believe language was a way to preserve. To honour. Now I wonder if it’s a weapon sharpened by grief, and wielded by strangers.
The air in my apartment feels thick. The pages on my desk curl at the edges as though burning from an invisible fire. Somewhere, I’m certain, someone is listening. Not the dead. Not anymore.
But someone. Alive enough to kill. And I, the man with the pen, have become the knife.
