Strange Bird – Molly Raskin

January 20, 2026

Everyone says corpses turn blue. If you stop breathing, you must turn blue. It’s the only logical outcome. Deoxygenated blood reflects violet wavelengths of light.
        Nevertheless, my grandmother’s body turned yellow. She was an unusual woman; it wouldn’t be like her to turn blue. A day earlier, the hospital chaplain told me he heard she had zest. The nurses had documented her eccentricity. I corrected the chaplain: Miriam was the whole lemon. Zest had her, not the other way around. Maybe that’s why she turned yellow.
        Don’t tell me I’m disrespecting her memory. My grandmother would want you to know the grotesque facts of life and death. She used to sit me down next to the toaster oven, offer me a tzitzel bagel with olive paste, and tell me harsh truths about the universe. She told me it’s extremely rare for anyone to possess both a penis and a brain. I was nine years old. She told me she was a virgin until her wedding night, but that it really didn’t matter what I did so long as I didn’t embarrass her by getting pregnant out of wedlock. She told me her grandparents dug their own graves before they were murdered. She told me she was worried I was too much like her. She told me she loved me exactly the way I am.
        She would want you to know that she turned yellow, not blue.
        Her corpse did, however, turn cold in the stereotypical way. Earlier that day, when she was still alive, her hands were hot. Feverish, really. Dying people are bad at regulating their body temperature. Warm blood flows where it may, not where it’s needed.
        I held her hot hand and marveled that someone so close to death could look so alive, apart from her zombie gurgling. Whoever directed the famous zombie movies must’ve watched a lot of people die in real life. The gurgles are remarkably realistic.

My newborn daughter’s lips turned blue after a bath one night in 2020. Scared the bejesus out of me, if I ever had any bejesus at all. She only shivered for a minute or two before I dressed her in pajamas, but there she was: blue-lipped, happy as a clam, completely oblivious that she looked how corpses are supposed to look.
        I googled “baby lips blue after bath” and found a thousand reassuring articles from medical websites and a thousand Reddit posts from new parents panicking over the same thing.
        Babies are bad at regulating their body temperature. Babies are bad at everything. When they’re cold—even for a minute or two—oxygenated blood redirects towards their vital organs. The capillaries in their lips constrict, leaving only deoxygenated blood to reflect violet light: blue. Same mechanism. Cold people are blue.
        The baby was fine.

My dad didn’t say, “I’m devastated that my mother is dying.” He said, “I’ve been awake since two o’clock in the morning.” And then he said it a second day in a row.
        I didn’t say, “I’m worried about you, Dad.” I said, “Take one of Nancy’s Xanax tonight or else you’re going to die too.”
        “Do you want an expired one from a sandwich bag, or a fresh one from a bottle?” Aunt Nancy asked.
        “I don’t care,” Dad said.
        “Give him a fresh one. Dad, don’t take sandwich bag pills.”
        The oncologist called us a “very loving family.” A very loving family that rarely says I love you. An hour later, I asked my doctor friend what the oncologist meant while we sat in the cafeteria eating disgusting hospital eggs.
        “It means you’re allowing a natural death instead of forcing her to stay alive.”
        “It’s not natural. I told the overnight nurse to give her as much diazepam as she’s allowed to. My grandma is pretty neurotic. I want her to go out high as a kite.”
        “I mean you’re not putting her on a feeding tube or ventilator. You would be shocked how many people try to put their unconscious ninety-something family members on every treatment under the sun.”
        “Why do they do that?” I asked.
        “Sometimes it’s religious. They feel like they’re taking a life by not doing everything they can to prevent death.”
        “That’s stupid. God is the one killing my grandma, not me. None of this stuff even existed a hundred years ago. Do they think every death before the twentieth century was a murder? These scrambled eggs are ass, like actual ass.”
        “Yeah, well. That’s our religion.”
        “She was supposed to die in 1941,” I said.
        “Yeah,” she sympathized.
        “And then I wouldn’t have to eat these eggs.”

Miriam died in the oncology ward four days after she was diagnosed with cancer. She declined too quickly to be transferred to hospice. Upon admission to the hospital, when the nurse asked her who the president was, she offered her political opinion. She never lost a single brain cell until they all collapsed at once.
        I’ve never believed in Heaven or Hell; it’s against my religion. But when my grandfather died seven years ago, I told myself I would see him again. I decided that at the end of my life—when my neurons are blasting rapidfire in all directions, like Miriam’s were when her hands were hot—I’ll hallucinate him so vividly it’ll be as if it’s real. I just need to perceive him.
        I didn’t have time to integrate Miriam into the picture. When I die, I’ll have watched an unknowable number of people I love turn yellow or blue, felt them go from hot to cold. I’ll have attended deathbed after deathbed.
        The last day she spoke, she said, “I’m living my last days, and I’m enjoying every single one. And that’s good. I’ve been very lucky.”
        Then she pointed at an airplane outside the window of her hospital room and asked: “Is that a bird? It’s so beautiful. Isn’t it amazing that I should be able to see something so beautiful?”