Flash fiction, Monica Dickson

How to make a living coffin

• Place hemp fibre in a mould along with mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, the recyclers of nature. 

• Put aside thoughts of how you could never get your kids to eat mushrooms and now you never will.

• Lie down in the mould to check you have the correct size. 

• Try to imagine you are stretching out for a long afternoon nap, in a giant cot. Resist the urge to fall asleep immediately. Climb out again.

• Be patient. Just get on with it. Keep calm and carry on. Your coffin will be ready in less than a week. You don’t need to understand the science. 

• Think about the coffin as your baby, think about it when you wake up and when you go to sleep. 

• On the seventh day, fill the coffin with moss. Make it nice and squishy. This is your final resting place. Climb back into the coffin.

• Wear something biodegradable, not that synthetic blouse you wear to the office, the one that clings to you, static and sweaty, the one that makes you feel like you’re wearing a costume.

• Think of damp, shady places, think of that afternoon at the Beck when you forgot to take a blanket, when you sat on the dank earth and watched your kids fight over the rope swing, while you worried about childhood accidents, about unanswered emails, about unfulfilled dreams, about people you’d lost touch with, about haemorrhoids. 

• Allow the putrefaction process to neutralize the toxins in your body. Enrich the soil with your disappointments and failures, your paralysing fears, your pointless, petty ruminations. 

• Consider the fact that in the US alone they use enough wood, steel and concrete every year to build a tower of coffins the size of the Empire State Building. Ponder how many traditional coffins it would take to build the IKEA just off Junction 27 on the M62.

• Imagine being a Compostable Mushroom Coffin Inventor and what a cool job title that would be.

• Recall all those meetings you sat through, where people talked about thinking outside the box. Feel glad that you can still think of a pun, even under these circumstances.

• Contemplate how easy it would be to break out of this coffin before you start to turn into decayed organic matter, compost to compost, mulch to mulch.

• Ask yourself, where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time? and although you still have no idea what the answer is, realise it does not involve being eaten by insects, earthworms, beetles, or centipedes.

• Miss your kids. Miss your friends. Miss the things you haven’t done yet. Miss the rocks and the hard places. Dig deep. 

• Remember this coffin is alive. Notice how the moss gives beneath your weight, then how quickly it springs back as you push yourself to standing. 

• Hear the soothing voice of your yoga instructor, perhaps after making an imperceptible adjustment to your posture, asking, Different feeling now?

• Laugh. Loudly, wildly. And don’t cover your mouth. 

• Whisper to yourself, to the trees and the stars, to the network of fungal threads that support you: Yes. Yes. Yes.