Let the Dead Bury Themselves

By Caitlyn Kinsella

She is so obviously Anne Boleyn I don’t know how no one else sees it.  My mother says the dead stay dead and we have to respect that, but it isn’t true.  Everyone always thinks they were someone truly famous last time, or the time before.  I don’t.  I wasn’t Anne Boleyn.  Of course, Anne Boleyn wasn’t really Anne Boleyn, either.  I like to think she was Mary Magdalene, though I can’t know for sure.  And Mary Magdalene wasn’t really Mary Magdalene, either.  She was probably Noah’s wife.  And Eve, before that.  I said once that someone was the serpent, but my mother said that was even sillier than believing in recycled souls.  She’s probably right, she usually is.  About the serpent, anyway.  I know about the souls.

I’m recycled, but not anyone famous.  Not Cleopatra, or Robin Hood, or Blackbeard.  I know someone who thought they’d been Jesus, but that really is silly.

     Anyway.  My piano teacher is Anne Boleyn.  I only know because my history teacher (who could be anyone, but no one I recognize) showed us pictures and the resemblance is uncanny.  There she was.  Not a shiny penny of a princess like her daughter (I have a friend who thinks she was Elizabeth I, but she wasn’t), but small and self-contained and crisp.  It’s made me like my piano teacher more, knowing something so personal about her.  I won’t tell her, though, because sometimes people don’t take it well.  They want to believe that this life is their only life, that when it’s over it’s over and they can have peace.  Or they don’t want to be held accountable for past mistakes.  Or don’t want to think about their heads being chopped off.  Which makes it difficult, because if you know how you died before, you know how you’re likely to die again and can take steps to prevent it.  Not marry a mad king, to start with. 

I’ve given my piano teacher a red ribbon choker, so at least one of us knows, and remembers to watch out for, what’s coming.

Not that it will help much, on the days I don’t have piano lessons.  I’ve heard she likes riding motorcycles, and even if you wear a helmet, there’s a risk of decapitation.

—

About Caitlyn Kinsella

Kinsella is an itinerant bibliophile and lover of long words. Her fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, the Washington Square Review, and The Drum Literary Magazine.