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The Laughingstock of the Death-Collectors’ Convention

As I trundle my Labubu-bebaubled rolly suitcase across the echoey linoleum floor to my assigned spot between the Monster energy-drink vending machine and the scythe sharpener, I can feel the hollows of their eye sockets on me.

There she goes, the collector of cute death.

I’m the one who only goes after the easy deaths, the nice deaths. Grandparents who have lived full lives and die in their sleep, surrounded by loved ones. People who die the way everyone wants to, or says they do.

‘I want to die in my sleep, surrounded by loved ones.’

At the convention center each year, we display our favorite deaths, our rarest deaths, our collectors’ items, however we choose to define this.

On the cafeteria-style folding table, I arrange my scenes like so many Precious Moments figurines. I recreate these deathbed tableaux with modeling clay, and put them inside snow globes. With glitter. When an attendee comes to my booth, I pick one up and say something like: ‘Pop-Pop’s Gentle Demise in Columbus, Ohio, encircled by his grands and great-grands, 1997.’ Shake-a shake-a. A confetti of metallic flakes drifts onto their little clay heads, star-spangles Pop-Pop’s bed. It’s almost festive.

The others go for more of a taxidermy deal—mounted heads (actual heads, like deer heads but people), bloody implements of death. Some of them have little makeshift theaters adjacent to their booths, with folding chairs and a projector. They show snuff videos with 3D glasses. And popcorn.

There are prizes: Most Hard-Core Death (these usually involve sharks), Most Newsworthy Death (celebrities), Stupidest Death (TikTokers).

There is no prize for the Cutest Death. But I come anyway. My boss says it’s good for me to network.

What I don’t tell him during our one-on-ones, though, is that I don’t actually want to move ‘up’ to more hard-core kinds of death. I’m good with the grandparents. I’m good with the family standing around, wiping a twinkly tear—with sniffles, but also smiles: Didn’t so-and-so live a good life? What an example for us all.

One time my boss tried to move me up a notch, to bump up my prestige; he was looking out for me. He assigned me a grandpa—but one who had died in a waterskiing show. A cool grandpa. The grandpa had been shooting off a Roman candle with one hand and everything. While on the waterskis. It was the Fourth of July.

‘Metal!’ one of my co-workers said encouragingly, making the devil-horns sign with his skeleton fingers, when I mentioned the file one day at the water cooler.

The problem was: The grandpa had more planned. That was not supposed to be his grand finale.

He had trained a team of dolphins to windmill around him for his grandson’s birthday!

That never happened, of course. And so at the grandpa’s funeral, the family all said: ‘What if,’ ‘If only,’ ‘Just imagine how cool the dolphins would have been...’

I can’t bear to hear it, the regret in their voices. I don’t know why I’m like this. I just am.

The Labubus started as a joke. My co-workers would leave them at my desk, an emblem of how not-hard-core I am. How not-metal. While they’re all chugging Monster drinks then smashing the aluminum cans against their skulls, I’m sipping a mocha frappuccino with whipped cream and drizzle. Sometimes there’s air in the straw and I make a little slurp. They laugh.

One time a more philosophically inclined co-worker, who somehow had a fedora tucked beneath the hood of the cloak we all wear, puffed vape smoke through his lipless teeth and said: ‘Kundera called kitsch ‘the absolute denial of shit.’’ He meant that I did that—I denied shit. I denied the ugly realities of life, the ugly realities of death.

(I had glowered at him and chomped harder on my panda-bear cake pop.)

But after a while I started to own it, the Labubu thing. Most of these cuties come with key rings affixed to their scalps, so I attach them to things: my fanny pack, my rolly suitcase I use for business trips, the non-blade end of my scythe, which, yes, is BeDazzled™ and covered in Lisa Frank stickers.

(In fact, the Labubus began dying their own cute death back on Earth, once the fad faded. You could snap up fifty for a penny. People used them as sponges. I scooped up a trove from a landfill.)

Don’t ask me why, and maybe this is just the cake-pop-chompin’ snow-globe maker in me, but I have a feeling that someday all the cool deathlords around here will respect me for owning this, for being unapologetically who I am.

Their mockery of my cute deaths will peacefully cease to exist, a gentle smile on its lips, a montage of heartwarming freeze frames soundtracked by a Sarah McLachlan song.

And that will be the cutest death of all.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, Virginia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Lascaux Review, Ghost Parachute, Flash the Court, ARTWIFE, and elsewhere. She was once the ghostwriter for a cat named Mr. Whiskers. She is very friendly on Instagram: @christielauryn.