Exquisite Corpse
By Holly James
Sometimes, you know a thing is over long before you’re ready to admit it. You had brought me to your parents’ house in the countryside, because to you our relationship was like a sentence that needed work: it could be tweaked, restructured, made into something more coherent – maybe even beautiful. But by that time, I saw it as a lifeless corpse that no amount of tweaking, shaking, begging or pleading could bring back to life.
As soon as we arrived, you wanted to show me the bluebells growing in the garden, but when we opened the back door, there was a dead squirrel lying on the step. We both froze in shock and you let out a little exclamation of horror, or perhaps sadness. Maybe you thought the limp body might shudder back to life. There was no visible wound, no blood, no sign of an external cause for the strange and sad death of this lovely creature.
“An exquisite corpse,” you said finally.
“What?”
“Exquisite corpse. It’s a word game invented by the surrealists.”
In the game, you explained, the adjective noun adverbly verbs the adjective noun. Players work together to create interesting and unusual sentences, but you did the first one alone to illustrate the grammatical structure.
“A poor squirrel tragically suffers an untimely death. You try.”
But I think you knew by then that I didn’t want to try. After a moment I looked at you and said:
“Beautiful things inevitably come to their natural end.”
You didn’t say anything, just stared at the ground, softly tracing lines in the gravel with your feet.
Finally, you picked up the dead animal and I watched you go up the garden to bury it among the bluebells: A former lover quietly disposing of a lifeless body.
Holly James (she/her) is a British translator, writer and editor based in Paris.