Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: Kate McIntyre’s Death has abandoned his traditional accoutrements. He carries a clipboard instead of a scythe; he’s swapped the billowing robes for a bow tie; in fact, he’s forsaken human form altogether. It’s hard to know whether the narrator is upset more by the story’s assertion of their mortality or by the beleaguered form in which it arrives—and it’s McIntyre’s focus on this problem that lends the story its surreal, uneasy humor, which bubbles up through the voice and the sharp scenic details: a velvet robe, a spine, a cord.
To hear McIntyre read the piece, click below:
Evening Caller
Knock knock knock!
A visitor? Today? I’m wearing my warm velvet robe and my shearling slippers. The cat, whose fur is softer than my robe, hops off me. Sounds rattle him. Me too, if I may be honest. I stand to the side of the front window, counting on the glare to hide me. I see no one. I suspect solar-panel sellers, missionaries. I wait until I am sure whoever knocked is gone. Then I wait longer.
I open the door. Cold floods my face. A porcupine regards me. He wears a little polka-dot bow tie and holds a clipboard in his paws. His eyes are like jet-glass buttons. He tells me it’s time to die and points at his clipboard to add a little administrative oomph to the pronouncement.
I fall to my knees. I say, There must be some mistake, my name sounds like so many others, there are so many alternate spellings. In fact, I once lived a few doors down from another person with my name, and she received a bottle of nail polish I’d ordered online, a hard-to-find color—limited edition!—and she kept the polish for herself. Why should such a rough customer live while I must die?
The porcupine worries the clipboard in his paws but does not comment.
My body jellifies, and the porcupine shudders so his spines click together. It’s like my own spine left my back. I have this terrible notion that each of the porcupine’s spines is the spine of a person like me. I can peer through the porcupine’s black eyes into his home in an old tree, where he keeps his velvet robe, his bow ties, and his other spines. The spines he wears now are not even his best. I do not rate the first-tier spines.
My spine will not be a first-tier spine. I have lived too much for my own comfort. My spine has not been strengthened by labor. I thought there would be more time.
I ask the porcupine exactly when the end will come—at whose hands and in what manner?
The porcupine eats a few leaves off the yellow pansy in the pot by the door. He has said his piece.
The porcupine leads my cat away by a silk cord he must have brought for just this purpose. I watch their two brown bodies head off down the road. The porcupine walks on his back legs and uses a spine I suspect is mine for balance. The cat’s tail taps the porcupine’s side. The cat doesn’t look back, and I’m glad. I cinch my robe a mite tighter and sit on the stoop. I taste a bite of the yellow pansy. The evening’s darker than before. I don’t mind the cold.
Kate McIntyre is the author of Mad Prairie (UGA Press, 2021), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award. Recently, her work has appeared in West Branch, Electric Literature, and HAD. She is an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she co-edits the speculative flash journal hex. Find her online at katemcintyrewriting.com.
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So specific and precise, every image visible and even almost touchable – the softness – and I love that the cat goes off like that.
Loved the porcupine of death, an image I’ll take to my grave.