my grandmother told me when i was eight that she wanted an old-fashioned tombstone when she died, the kind that would weather quickly and become unreadable after a few generations. we visited a cemetery to take grave rubbings, the ground was a living carpet of locusts working voracious mandibles and i was loathe to move my feet. a few months ago the disused church that stood on the site was burned to the ground by arsonists. you took a dirt road many miles from the highway, through stubbled fields, and arrived at the modest clapboard church with black iron numerals reading 1850 above the doors. it was every surreal eighties horror movie nightmare, freddy rises out of the churning parched earth like a ronald reagan chthonic deity and chases the teenagers across the patchwork farmland that pitches and hisses. they come to the church but dang, the doors are bolted tight.
my hideous imaginings finally caught something on fire. i wish it could have been a telephone directory, maybe a silverfish.

i don't think i need a tombstone. when i die, hurl me into a bog and let the tannins turn my black hair red. let the suffocating horsehair peat keep me supple and moist and unwholesomely bright of eye. let it turn me into a five-foot tall mandrake-vanilla bean hybrid, shaped like a girl and leathered.
the bog is the ideal place to hide a body.