Every Last Trace

by Luc Reid

Regrettably, she realized only just after her death that she had turned on–only for a few minutes!–the bad lamp, the one that sparked sometimes, and that soon it would set her threadbare duvet on fire, then patiently make ash of her house and every last trace of her life–the manuscript hidden beneath the third stairstep that told who she really was and what she had really done, the letters (long thought destroyed) she’d once been given that were from Mark Twain to his youthful sweetheart, the haiku that had saved her from a grisly death–and that therefore all trace of her life, all clear evidence that she had ever danced at that long, badly-organized ice cream social that was human life, would be lost. And yet the bone-skinny little bushman who had come to greet her smiled as he offered his hand, and she smiled tentatively back as she took the hand and set off with him to the Next Place.