Flash Nonfiction: Just Gone

By: Dana Jeanne Keller

Sometimes I play a game where I pretend you’re not dead, just gone.

On a vacation somewhere. Chasing your dreams. A cooking class in France, an apprenticeship at a restaurant in Amsterdam or Rome.

No, not dead, just too busy to write, to call, to visit. You’re living another life I can’t be part of: it’s too glamorous, too full.

Often you’re on a beach, reclining in a colorful chair, your skin dark golden-brown from the sun, glowing, the scent of coconut oil rising off of it. Your strong, thick legs are crossed, your large, wide feet flexed, your toes splayed, the ocean visible in the gaps between them. Your auburn hair is in a Rapunzel-long braid that snakes around your neck and disappears beneath your knees.

You’re wearing that black bathing suit—the one your aunt got for you in Europe, that laced up in the back, that you lost and still talked about more than a decade later. A boozy tropical drink sits on a table beside you, next to a bulky fantasy book. Your rough hands rest atop your soft belly, your half-shut eyes watch the water, your puffy lips turn up gently at the corners.

Maybe once you even wrote me a postcard, but it got lost and you didn’t send another because you know I know you love me; you think of me often but are just too busy to write. When you think of me you smile, though.

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Dana Jeanne Keller is a West-Coast-Canada-born expat who’s been writing and editing professionally since 2005. Obsessions include all things melancholy and/or spooky, particularly grief and hauntings—and the spaces where the two overlap. Dana’s most recent publication was an essay exploring embodied grief and trauma in haunted house narratives, released in 2020 in the book The Streaming of Hill House.