And Comedy Killed the Soap Opera Star
Dedicated to Betty White, Written Years Ago
We watch them drop in threes (the most I usually see is in June)
We stalk the web waiting, waiting, waiting
TMZ feeds our obsession (now it is a Hydra—swelling, multiplying with every strike against it)
“I bet he doesn’t make it past thirty” “She’s the hardiest bitch I’ve ever seen; she’ll make it to a hundred easy” “He’s already older than Adam and Eve”
This one from drugs, only thirty-two (what a shame; always troubled, I knew)
He was ninety-three, a Tinsel Town legend
and of course he died—did you see that god awful remake? (Comedy always kills Soap Opera stars)
page after page—pneumonia, cancer, car crash, suicide, alcohol, overdose, natural causes—they’re all having breakfast in the Brady kitchen
dabbling in drinks outside the Viper Room
spinning wildly with cartoon rabbits or dueling with Peter Pan
haunting the megaplex, finally free of hoodoo curses—
free to laugh too loud, to sing off-key, to dance like a donkey with four left hooves
to gather where friendly ghosts come out to socialize
I sit alone in a darkened room, scrolling through the obituaries (the first to notify Facebook)
and play their movies, their songs, their whatever in the background (I don’t even hear)
and wonder if that afterlife
really is so elite
About the Creator
Stephanie Hoogstad
With a BA in English and MSc in Creative Writing, writing is my life. I have edited and ghost written for years with some published stories and poems of my own.
Learn more about me: thewritersscrapbin.com
Support my writing: Patreon
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Six Feet Under
Buried alive. What a horrible way to go. Yazz lay there, in her own thoughts. What else could she do? She was hungry, thirsty, tired, mentally, and physically exhausted, and more than anything, she was bored. She hoped she would die of boredom before anything else, anything else would've been more painful. Like many people had, she and her friends had talked about what they reckon the worst ways to die were, it was a morbid subject, but it came up every now and again. Yazz had always been one to argue her point on drowning, others had mentioned burning alive, slowly and painfully bleeding to death, hung drawn and quartered, and being starved to death. It was strange that none of them had considered being buried alive, it had never come up. But now, she was thinking back to those conversations her and her friends had had, how could they have not thought about it? It took a lot longer than the others, you were completely confined, you couldn't move or do anything, you just had to wait, until your body was physically unable to support a life system anymore, which could take up to four days. Four! By far the longest out of all of them. She recounted some of these conversations just to try and pass the time, anything to pass the time. It was difficult to know how much time had passed since she had been underground, it was difficult to know anything. There were many things that Yazz didn't know, she didn't know where she was, she didn't know how she'd got into the coffin, she'd just woken up there. Yazz also didn't know what time it was, or even what day it was, she guessed at Tuesday, it was Sunday evening when she'd been buried alive, intentionally, and although it had felt like weeks had passed, she was still alive, which means she hadn't died from dehydration, and therefore it couldn't have been more than four days.
By Liam Storm3 days ago in Fiction
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