My grandfather found his mother’s body. She was his neighbor and getting on in years. I’ve imagined the scene, how it might have happened.
I’ve pictured my grandfather’s concern after missing her working in the yard for a few days. I’ve heard the silence after my grandfather knocked on her front door, and I’ve seen the television set still on after he looked in her back window. I’ve felt my grandfather’s heart break at the usually innocuous sight of a half-eaten piece of buttered toast lying on the edge of a coffee table: It hadn’t happened in her sleep.
Over the past few months, while working on this article, I’ve often returned to that imagined scene, not out of morbid curiosity, but because it feels both eerily familiar and, given whose mother was involved, strangely doubled. It feels like a scene from one of Brad Watson’s short stories. Those stories were first collected in , winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize, and , a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Now, following Watson’s death at 64 on July 8, 2020, the most celebrated from those two collections are resurrected in . Resurrection is a key theme to Watson’s work. In his novel , a finalist for the National Book Award, corpses rise from mortuary tables, sometimes from a case of undiagnosed catalepsy, other times after a bout of mutually consensual necrophiliac kink, and his short story “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” excerpted from an unfinished novel in the new collection, follows a zookee.