Pretend That We're Dead continued
There were drunken, meandering footsteps, the sound of a zip. It stopped. Then footsteps again, faster, back down the alley. Choking and splattering. I was tempted to open an eye, but I didn't.
After a minute or two, there were more. Steadier this time, feet slower, tapping heels among them. And voices.
"There."
"Shit. Oh, shit…"
"Oh god, that's…" a girl, gulping, swallowing back vomit. "Jesus…"
"Go back to the road."
Her heels tapped unsteadily away.
"What the fuck do you think happened?"
"God knows. Must have been here a while."
"We should call the cops."
Here it came. I would need to run, come back to life, a miraculous recovery. Lazarus, raised from the dead.
"Wait."
"Huh?"
"He might have a wallet." There was silence. God, that's sick. Some people are sick.
"You're fucking mad."
"He might have money. You never know…."
"Fuck off." More footsteps, the soft pad of trainers.
He came closer, breath rasping. His foot scraped on concrete, right between my legs. Impossible now for me to be resurrect myself in a hurry. Something brushed against my top, pulling at the pockets.
Genius: I didn't have to move. I simply breathed, a long, loud exhale. My eyes popped open.
He jumped back. He caught my gaze for a millisecond before haring off down the alley, chasing his sanity and broken friendships.
I got up and drew the hood back over my head. I didn't even feel the cold on the way home.
After that I did it all the time. I'd be on the bus, on the way to my cubicle, or I'd bob into the library. No good those places. Most of the occupants seemed half dead already. The gentle rocking of the bus spoiled the stillness, although I tried to feel how a body would behave with the motion. Not much different to a living one, as it turned out.
One day I went to the swimming baths and saw this little kid looking at me. He was skinny, all sticking out bones, skeleton practically on show. Beautiful. I let my tongue loll and sank, eyes skyward. When I surfaced he was already laughing.
Kids were harder to fool than squirrels. They don't believe in death.
One day I did it in a gallery. The full works, a new patch of rot, eyes done better than before. It was perfect. There was a hexagonal sofa in the middle of the room, dark, expensive leather, so that people could sit and watch the pictures not moving. I lay on the sofa, one leg stuck out. I experimented with a lolling tongue, but thought I might get thrown out for dripping. I tucked it back in and closed my eyes.
The footsteps passed close by, echoing. I couldn't tell if they were looking at the pictures or at me. Then they came closer. "Oh, how clever," someone said. Then "Ooh, how horrible." It went on for hours, people admiring their deepest dread. An art form, just how I'd imagined it, but now just another art form. Not like the sound of fear and the smell of vomit. Not like the real thing.
I had to go further. I tried to get in the morgue, just for a look, but they wouldn't let me in. They started with that suspicious line between the eyes that people get. Bastards. They didn't know the secret they held, what they guarded. They could be that close all day, dressing, embalming, painting over death's visage, slamming bodies into cupboards, and still not see.
I started to go to funerals instead, any funerals, reading the obits every day for the schedules. I always hoped for an open casket. Mostly they were closed, as though people were reluctant to look at our future. I passed through like a ghost, looking like I was trying not to cry. No one said anything.
One day it was a child. She was small, and the coffin was small too, and white. A clean thing to give to the flames or the deep mud. It was open. And I knew when I saw her, she'd been waiting for me. Her face was painted white, her lips ice pink, but edged in blue. Her dress was brighter, the fresh blue of the sky. It had little white flowers and tiny green leaves. She was beautiful, serene.
Then her head turned, curls brushing softly on the satin, and her eyes opened.
It's what we all become, this decay, but it was all right. She was all right. She was telling me so. Because we never had any substance, not really. We just melt away to water and powder and bone.
It's like the bubbles in a river, silver bubbles that fight and buffet, but they're all one just the same. They just don't know it yet. When we reach the air and burst, then we will know. Because we won't even be there, not really, we'll be somewhere else with no bodies, no waste, no rot, no division. No exclaiming, no shock, no throwing up at the sight of one another. No failure to notice. It will all be one: one mind, one being, one spirit. That what it's like, being dead. That is our hope: that there are no cubicles in heaven.
I looked at the girl, reached out a hand to touch her cold skin, but let it fall back to my side. Then I turned and walked away. I left her behind; left her to become something else.
'Pretend That We're Dead' was previously published in Whispers of Wickedness #11 (Winter 2005).