My name is Paudrigotuma and over the years when friends have died or relatives have died

I've gotten used to the fact that shortly after they'll die something will happen

where I have a dream about them or I see

somebody that looks just like them and of course it's just an association in the

mind but I welcome those times during COVID a very close friend died and he didn't show up in my dreams and I couldn't see him around the place because I wasn't out on the street to be able to see someone that looked like him and feel like there was some kind of visitation.

So I made it up.

I made up a story for what would be like to see him

so that I could have that final conversation. Three mangoes, one pound, by Candace Chavan Walker. You know, the dead are never dead because I saw my mom's

mom walking down Lewisham High Street. She was wearing purple. She bites out of unripe mangoes, replacing them with the other fruit.

Either she was invisible to the market vendors or unimaginable, the same thing really.

Our dead couldn't stay dead even if they wanted to, what we call a legacy.

Her voice when she spoke sounded tini with a hair-raising

intimacy. We met last in a Toronto suburb. I remember nothing about her except pearls, deep violet dress, full wig of violent shine curls.

Her home smelled like clean magic, fans running in every room, but she wouldn't open

the windows, afraid we'd let the dead back in, as if they hadn't made it through customs in our suitcases.

Her figure wavered, a telephone line with a fault.

Her death, too, was technical, speaking nothing of the bloated cancers, marbled purple calves, decaying

water-lowed feet, an email with her name in the subject line.

Just the Barbadian man from Waltonstow recognised iron in the air,

her smell like an animal wound.

He looked up, put a mango in a wrinkled blue bag. His

smile was not without empathy. For free, he said.

...