by Maggie Hart
That’s what the website said it was for. They could shape a companion if you shared memories of someone you lost, and isn’t that what we’re supposed to do when someone dies? She’ll live on in our memories, in our hearts, in our stories, that’s what the priest said at the funeral as your corpse lay pallid and rotting in a casket that cost $1649.99 on a muggy Tuesday in June. Tuesdays were your least favorite day—I told the website that. That’s something I shared.
I told it that you bit into tomatoes like they were apples and sometimes poured a dash of salt into the palm of your hand and dabbed at it with your tongue. I told it that you didn’t even own nail clippers because you got a pedicure every two weeks and because you chewed your fingernails down until they bled. I hated this about you when you were alive—the clicking of your nails against teeth, keratin against bone. I told it your sneezes came in threes and you made pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse and you used cookie cutters to slice bologna into stars and hearts and gingerbread men. I told it about the pale scar on your left knee from when you fell onto the concrete while teaching me to roller skate, the skin tag on your fleshy underarm I thought was ugly.
I told it that I missed you, which made me think about how missing can mean failing to experience something, or arriving too late, like how you’d miss breakfast on your bad days because you’d sleep in as long as you could, and I know that I failed to experience you when you were here and now you’re not, and that’s how I ended up staring at that navy-blue screen on my desktop in the first place, with its sleek sans-serif directive to KEEP THEIR VOICE CLOSE, and I want your voice close, I do. I want your voice and your fleshy arms and your stomach that I used to rest my head upon when I was a child. Your voice was the first sound I heard in this world. Of course I want to keep it close. I want to keep it and I want to keep you, and if I uploaded enough fragments—enough tomatoes and salt and fingernails and Tuesdays—I could. I could recreate you, that’s what the website said.
Recreate, to make something exist again.
Recreate, nestled in recreation, an activity done for enjoyment.
This is not what this is, enjoyment. I do not enjoy spending $19 a month to REMEMBER you, or $49 a month to hear your VOICE, or $149 a month for your PRESENCE. But I want to remember you, I want your voice, I want your presence. I want, I want, I want. I want to remember you alive and with salt on your tongue and not with your body swollen and your hands folded across your chest, because that’s where dead hands belong, your gnawed-at fingernails painted a color you never wore. I want to hear your voice, to KEEP IT CLOSE, to remember the timbre and the fry and the way you spoke in a British accent after watching any movie with Kiera Knightley in it. And your presence? My god, I’d pay anything. I’d do anything.
I miss and I want and I recreate. I share more of you with the navy-blue website, and as I type, I remember that once, a very long time ago, or maybe not that long ago at all, my hands had been small enough to disappear inside yours.
Maggie Hart is a writer, traveler, and leukemia survivor from Colorado. She's currently pursuing a PhD in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she also teaches undergraduate writing courses. Her work has been published in Off Assignment, Narratively, Gordon Square Review, Journal of Narrative Medicine, Phoebe, and The Audacity, among others. Instagram: @maggie.hart Website: maggie-hart.com
Emerge Literary Journal 