‘The Orangery’ by Mark Gallacher

Infrequent Deaths

From Pulp Literature Issue 46, Mark Gallacher‘s ‘The Orangery’ asks us to contemplate grief in a future where death is a rarity. Enjoy an excerpt of this story below, and discover the rest in Issue 46, Spring 2025.

The Orangery

by Mark Gallacher

You have one brother and five sisters. William. Marianne. Olivia. Silvia. Melissa. Angeline. The brother you sometimes forget but not the sisters. The oldest sister, Marianne, passed away a week ago, optimistic as ever, slipping into a final contented coma. What did she die of?

She died of congestive heart failure.

It’s the kind of gently corrective thought generated by some of your mods that is supposed to mitigate failing memory. Dates. Names. Relationships. Facts. A breeze of data cascading in the background to keep dementia and infirmity of thought at bay. And to hide your tendency to forget awkward facts. But increasingly, the mods make you feel like you are a tourist inside your own mind. Who put all the data in there?

You did.

You crossed two continents to get to Marianne’s bedside and silently told her to shut up, because whatever she was telling you, with that hint of a smile on her dead face, you knew she was right.

At your great age, strong feelings rarely bloom. You have an airy, wintry mind. So when the sudden wave of intense grief swept through you as you stood by Marianne’s deathbed, you looked away and smiled a strange, quivering smile. Like your heart was wreckage sucked up from the silt of time.

Silvia, never one to avoid a scene, asked what was so amusing.

You muttered something unintelligible—an old man’s defence—and reached for the silk handkerchief in your shirt pocket, the one Marianne had given you forty years before. But you’d lost it thirty years ago in Singapore, hurrying out of an art museum, looking for a taxi. You can’t remember a thing about the art museum, but you can remember the taxi driver’s face.

The Hope Singapore International Museum of Arts. Founded 1960. You visited the Hian Retrospective Exhibition on 16 May 2072.

“I just learned my ex-wife is dead,” you had wanted to tell the taxi driver. All the art in the world rendered stupid and meaningless. Instead, you rasped, “Airport.” You spent the rest of the journey wondering how you could still have been in love with her and not known it, and what that meant for your second wife—which turned out not to be very much, because she was already making secret arrangements to divorce you. Something else you didn’t see coming.

“You don’t even know how to cry properly,” Silvia said, but the other sisters admonished her with tuts and disapproving glances.

Find the full story in Pulp Literature Issue 46, Spring 2025

Mark Gallacher is a Scottish writer who lives in Denmark. He has been twice shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the 2021 Wigtown Poetry Prize. His sci-fi novel Saved From the Fire was released by Ringwood Publishing in 2021.