1 like = 1 fact about the land of the dead
1. Push on your eyeballs a little too hard. See the patterns? Feel the pressure? That’s what it’s like to be awake in the underworld.
2. The food tastes like vertigo and the vertigo feels like a time lapse of a lily opening and lilies opening look like velvet touched while half-asleep.
3. You can dance there but the only music is Celine Dion singing songs she never actually sang.
4. If you’ve ever buried your hand in cold wet sand and felt something move under your fingertips, that’s it, that’s love after death.
5. Going in to bring back a loved one never works out but there’s no other motive that’ll get you in and out alive.
6. Everything in the underworld is alive except the people. There’s a reason for this.
7. The sensation of a joint popping is the preferred greeting.
8. The sensation of sliding a knife into cartilage is the preferred farewell, and also in the underworld.
9. At night, the sky shows you constellations of secrets. Every time one is revealed to the living, a star winks out in the land of the dead.
10. You always dream of your life, but this time you see everything. All the details you missed the first time. The way she looked when she turned away. What he said in the dead of night as you slept. All the tiny patterns that make your life a story, too late for you to use them
11. You can be reborn but it hurts to squeeze back into flesh. It hurts so much that your new brain has to forget everything just to cope, and that is why babies cry and know nothing.
12. There are no pits of torment or isles of the blessed, except where such may be combined in one location.
13. You can fly if you want.
14. There’s not a whole lot you can’t do, in fact, except have children. But there are always a lot of new arrivals from earth to adopt, if that works for you and them.
15. Trust me: you don’t want to look into a mirror in the underworld. When you get there you’ll know why, and try to be reborn just to forget.
16. In one part of the underworld they are building armor, weapons, siege engines, training in formation. They shout nonsense commands. One soldier will say they’re preparing for war against heaven, another that they are about to invade the living world. No one reason is alike.
17. Beauty is different there. If you’ve ever wanted to write love notes to the wind off the tide flats, have I got good news for you
18. There isn’t much point in eating, but habit compels you. Actually, a lifetime of habits is mostly what keeps you together there. The oldest of the dead is a worn-down stone; nobody knows their name, but they are envied: they have forgotten how to be alive.
19. Do you know the feeling of having a heart? That knot of emotion and blood in your chest? That is how it feels to sleep in the underworld.
20. Every body of water is rumored to be Lethe. People tell you it’s over the next ridge. It’s the sea. It’s in the pipes. Everyone hopes the next drink of water is oblivion.
21. They have their own legends and myths in the underworld. Have you heard the one that goes [an ache in the head and the scent of thyme]? Classic.
22. If you’ve ever touched a slug and not been able to rid yourself of the slime, you’re prepared for hadean lingerie.
23. Most people are full of mice. It’s not polite to mention it unless one is showing. If one of your mice is actually a rat, better get that checked out.
24. There are maladies in the underworld: bone hair, the swivels, chronic asphodel. They’re all communicable. They’re all edible.
25. There’s a ballroom in the civic center. The master of ceremonies likes to hold dances. He’s not dead so it’s best to steer clear.
26. If you die in the underworld you die in real life.
27. If you put in garden all you have to plant are your own teeth. Most people do it out of boredom, because it’s not like you can do anything with a crop of teeth.
28. You can always swim up and revisit your body if you want. Rattle the bones a bit, make ghostly cries. The novelty goes away after a few centuries, and so does your body’s cohesion.
29. Ghost stories in the underworld are like stories about billionaires here. HE made it; surely so can I. Unfortunately, as with extreme wealth, becoming a ghost is largely a matter of where you’re born.
30. Only once has someone in the underworld written a poem. Nobody talks about that. Everyone obeys the No Trespassing signs at the site. They all look forward to the devastation being repaired someday.
31. There is only one crime in the underworld, but the living have no words or concepts for it. I suppose you could express it as the scent of jasmine, but too quiet.
32. You forget one thing immediately upon death: Quentin Tarantino. Even people in Mycenae or Uruk forgot him upon death, and didn’t know what that brief extinguished flare of memory was.
33. There is a queen of the dead. The position is largely ceremonial. Her saliva is sleep and her hands are pain; her embrace is like the tension of a child on whom a wasp has landed. She is the most beautiful person you have ever seen.
34. The currency of death is dust. You are all rich. The food of death is water. You are all starving.
35. What is the thirstiest you have ever been? How dry was your throat? How much did you want cool water? That is a typical sunset in the underworld. Everyone has the inspirational calendars of it, too.
36. If you touch a living sand dollar, is rough and wet and purple, with few (if any) visible organs. That’s happiness, in the land of death.
37. Were you ever in love with your childhood best friend? Would you have done anything for them, because you did not fully understand the meaning of their limbs in the summer sun, only that it was a command? That is the only feeling that is the same in the underworld.
38. A dream of drowning is coveted in the land of the dead. It means you will be reborn painlessly, full of memory. Nobody ever has that dream there.
39. Everything is paths in the underworld, though some things are staircases too. They all lead back to you.
40. Sometimes the clouds there break and for a moment the sun shines. You can call any name you wish at that tone. The dry air fills with voices aimed at earth. They drown each other out until all humanity senses is a breeze smelling of nutmeg, and they cry without knowing why.
