Raspberry Toaster Strudel Flavored Death

The moment Cherry Morris died, she was thinking about raspberry toaster strudel. There was a box of them in her freezer, torn open at the wrong end, crinkled polyethylene scrunched up at the bottom, half empty. She loved those delicious things, all fake chemicals and flakey crunch. Imaginary tang coated the roof of her mouth as her breathing stilled, a saturated scarlet with sullen tiny seeds, slicing the hell out of her soft palate.

Sweet. Frozen. Gone.

The snow melted her calcium bones. Liquified them into fruity pink sugar sludge and white frosting. She could feel the heat of it needling its way under her fingernails, felt the warmth evaporating the blood that had congealed around her. Her eyelashes fluttered, discarding bits of broken snowflakes into the pale moonquartz of her eyes. She wished she could say she died looking at the stars. She wished she could say she traced the seams of the galaxy with her last movements. That she sketched the heavens with one last point of her metacarpals. That she had prophesized herself into a future luminary. But the sky was too swollen with rough altostratus clouds, sloughing off each other like the flesh on Cherry’s ribs sloughed off the bone.

She wished she could have mourned those stars. She wished she could have rhapsodized about the ethics of light pollution and winter soaked suburban Michigan and hit and runs, but her thoughts were fuzzy like mold growing swiftly over raspberries.

Sweet. Frozen. Gone.

That’s what she was. Just another raspberry toaster strudel. She puffed out one last swirling stream of icy life and her eyes glazed over as frost crystallized, almost like stars, on her breath.