The Obituaries Editor

At seventeen, Rodolfo worked for the local newspaper editing the obituaries. When someone submitted a notification for someone not yet dead, Rodolfo’s job was made difficult.

He was a cab driver who never wore a hat, even during winter months, because he was proud of his unruly, white curls, and liked to show them off among his younger, balding co-workers. Or, at least this is how Rodolfo imagined the man in the notice was disposed after hearing his voice over the telephone. The “dead” called to inform the newspaper that his voice was proof of his vitality. The seventeen-year-old Rodolfo never imagined death could be so complicated. Following the prank, Rodolfo had to verify the deaths of all potential obituary stories.

He quit soon afterwards. Posing the following question to the presumed deceased’s family and friends was too much: “Hi, I am the Obituaries Editor for The Telegraph. I am calling to confirm the unfortunate departure of your son. Is he or is he not dead?”

Yet, despite this short-lived experience, now, at fifty-seven years of age, the former editor has found himself a strange hobby collecting newspaper clippings of obituary headlines.

Marta Petrov; age 78; immigrated to the U.S. from Russia when she was 9.

Karl Levine; age 36; sold baseball cards.

Every clipping reminds him of the possibility that one of these poor “dead” folk could still be alive. Every clipping gives birth to his fear that one’s whole life could be reduced to half a sentence.

Martas and Karls cover the walls of his country cottage. “This Marta may have survived by hiding in a cave after getting lost in the Catskills during that hike when she was supposedly eaten by bears,” he would tell himself. “This Karl may have amnesia and could very well be walking the streets of some cobbled-stoned park disguised as a beggar or a street performer because he knows no better.”

And Rodolfo would cry. And his chair would creak a little—its joints too old now to support such sorrow. Following the tears, Rodolfo would separate all the clippings into three piles he would place on one of three walls: the most probable to be alive wall, the most probable to be dead wall, and the wall for the people he wished remained among the living.

During other times when he felt more romantic and less sentimental, he would flirt with the Martas and Karls and would offer them a dance or two. He’d untack them from his wall, play a song not meant for slow dancing, like some early Dylan or Woody Guthrie, and whisper words he’d wish someone would to him.

After the slow dance, he’d proceed to his desk, lay the clipping down softly on his desktop like one does a fragile child with a fever, cross his legs, and place his typewriter on his lap. His fingers were left smudged with black newspaper type from holding the sweaty hands of the “dead.” He’d then proceed to write a novel about each name because, as he put it, “All life is worth more than a handful or two of words.”

But it is in his own handwritten journals that the story of this fifty-seven-year-old is better told than any obituary ever could. His notebooks share the fear of the “dead” calling forty years earlier to prove his vitality. The ink, though dry, is wet with sincerity. But when he felt most vulnerable—as any forensic psychologist would agree—he would write with a pencil, which he sharpened with the same knife he used to chop garlic.

His notebooks: full of possible headlines for his own mortality. All but one crossed out. Rodolfo de la Cruz; age 57; Sometimes death is only in the editing.


Julián Esteban Torres López Contributor
Julián Esteban Torres López is an editor, writer, researcher, and educator with nearly two decades’ experience working with publications, historical societies, writers, and cultural and research institutions, and has held leadership positions in the academe, arts, journals, business sector, and history museums. His debut collection of minimalist poetry, Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins, is on Amazon.
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  20. […] Surgically Enhanced Mannequins, is available now. His work appears in PANK Magazine, Into the Void Magazine, The Acentos Review, Novus Literary and Arts Journal, Havik 2021: Inside Brilliance, among others. […]

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