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Dead Soon Enough

Published using pen name: - JP Barnes

Dead Soon Enough’ is the light-hearted story of a young man’s early encounters with poverty and death in his struggles to make a new life. It is one of a number I am writing about the waning of the belief in an afterlife and more specifically, in the Christian resurrection, amongst the young in a still-predominantly Catholic Ireland. It is the second-published in a series of stories using a variety of tales about the Biblical figure of Lazarus, as a way of structuring the narratives. While Lazarus lives, he knows for certain what is to come when life is over; what he knows, however, we can never know. He is used as an emblem of the limits of human knowledge about endings.

The story falls into two parts which are linked a) by the presence of fleas, but also b) by one each of the two Biblical Lazaruses; one from St Luke‘s gospel (about poverty) and one from St John’s (about the promise of the resurrection). The second part of the story is a ‘modern dress’ version of the story of the raising of Lazarus; for example, as in the Biblical story of Lazarus, the character’s hands are wrapped in thin strips of cloth. He collapses in an enclosed space, but unlike Lazarus, he is neither called out by a Christ figure, nor survives the collapse. The function of the updating in the story is to reflect a number of the characters’ scepticism about the possibility of an afterlife in this and in other stories. As in the other piece, My overall aim in these interlinked stories is to say that our only guaranteed form of afterlife is through the narratives and images we make ourselves.