by J M Lassen
“Tom, why don’t people from town come out to places like this and just take them back? We’re so much stronger than the zoms. Why don’t we take everything back?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. I ask myself that every day. The people on the other side of the fence—for the most part they don’t even want to admit to themselves that the rest of the world exists. They feel safe over there.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yes,” Tom said, “it surely is.”
He turned the doorknob and opened the door. “Are you coming?”
Benny came as far as the front step. “It’s not safe in there, is it?”
“It’s not safe anywhere, Benny.”
They were both aware in that moment that they were having a different discussion than the words they exchanged.
The brothers went into the house.
Tom led the way down a hall and into a spacious living room that had once been light and airy. Now it was pale and filled with dust. The wallpaper had faded, and there were animal tracks on the floor. There was a cold fireplace and a mantel filled with picture frames. The pictures were of a family. Mother and father. A smiling son in a uniform. A baby in a blue blanket. Brothers and cousins and grandparents. Two sisters who looked like they might have been twins but weren’t. Everyone was smiling. Benny stood looking at the pictures for a long time and then reached up and took one down. A wedding picture.
“Where are they?” he asked softly.
“In here,” said Tom.
Still holding the picture, Benny followed Tom through a dining room and into a kitchen. The windows were open and the yard was filled with trees. Two straight-backed chairs sat in front of the window, and in the chairs were two withered zombies. Both of them turned their heads toward the sound of footsteps. Their jaws were tied shut with silken cord. The man was dressed in the tatters of an old blue uniform; the woman wore a tailored suit and frilly white blouse. Benny came around front and looked from them to the wedding picture and back again.
“It’s hard to tell.”
“Not when you get used to it,” said Tom. “The shape of the ears, the height of the cheekbones, the angle of the jaw, the distance between the nose and upper lip. Those things won’t change even after years.”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Benny said again.
“That’s up to you.” Tom took his knife from his pocket and opened it. “I’ll do one, and you can do the other. If you’re ready. If you can.”
Tom went to stand behind the man. He gently pushed the zombie’s head forward and placed the tip of the knife in place, doing everything slowly, reminding Benny of how it had to be done.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” said Benny.
“I’ve already said it,” said Tom. “A thousand times. I waited because I knew that you might want to say something.”
“I didn’t know them,” said Benny.
A tear fell from Tom’s eye onto the back of the struggling zombie’s neck.
He plunged the blade and the struggles stopped. Just like that. Tom hung his head for a moment as a sob broke in his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “Be at peace.”
He sniffed and held the knife out to Benny.
“I can’t!” Benny said, backing away. ”Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t!”
Tom stood there, tears rolling down his cheeks, holding the knife out. He didn’t say a word.
“God… please don’t make me do this,” said Benny. Tom shook his head.
“Please, Tom.”
Tom lowered the knife.
The female zombie threw her weight against the cords and uttered a shrill moan that was like a dagger in Benny’s mind. He covered his ears and turned away. He dropped into a crouch, face tucked into the corner between the back door and the wall, shaking his head.
Tom stood where he was.
It took Benny a long, long time. He stopped shaking his head and leaned his forehead against the wood. The zombie in the chair kept moaning. Benny turned and dropped onto his knees. He dragged a forearm under his nose and sniffed.
“She’ll be like that forever, won’t she?” Tom said nothing.
“Yes,” said Benny, answering his own question. “Yes.” He climbed slowly to his feet.
“Okay,” he said, and held out his hand. His hand and arm trembled. Tom’s trembled, too, as he handed over the knife.
Benny stood behind the zombie, and it took six or seven tries before he could bring himself to touch her. Eventually he managed it. Tom guided him, touching the spot where the knife had to go. Benny put the tip of the knife in place.
“When you do it,” said Tom, “do it quick.”
“Can they feel pain?”
“I don’t know. But you can. I can. Do it quick.”
Benny took a ragged breath and said, “I love you, Mom.”
He did it quickly.
And it was over.
He dropped the knife, and Tom gathered him up, and they sank down to their knees together on the kitchen floor, crying so loud that it threatened to break the world. In the chairs, the two dead people sat slumped, their heads tilted toward one another, their withered mouths silent.
The sun was tumbling behind the edge of the mountain by the time they left the house. Together they’d dug graves in the backyard. Tom locked up the house and then relocked the chain on the front gate. Side by side they walked back the way they had come. The knife was in Benny’s pocket. He had asked Tom if he could keep it.
“Why?” his brother asked.
Benny’s eyes were puffy from crying but they were dry. “I guess I’ll need it,” he said.
Tom studied him for a long time. His smile was sad but his eyes were filled with love. And with pride.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s head back.”
Benny Imura looked back at the wrought-iron gates and at the words painted outside. He nodded to himself.
Together they walked through the gathering twilight back to the way station.
;/{}
THE
WRONG
GRAVE
KELLY LINK
All of this happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year. Miles planned to do this in order to recover the sheaf of poems he had, in what he’d felt was a beautiful and romantic gesture, put into her casket. Or possibly it had just been a really dumb thing to do. He hadn’t made copies. Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front.
He’d tucked the poems, handwritten, tear-stained and with cross-outs, under Bethany’s hands. Her fingers had felt like candles, fat and waxy and pleasantly cool, until you remembered that they were fingers. And he couldn’t help noticing that there was something wrong about her breasts, they seemed larger. If Bethany had known that she was going to die, would she have gone all the way with him? One of his poems was about that, about how now they never would, how it was too late now. Carpe diem before you run out of diem.
Bethany’s eyes were closed, someone had done that, too, just like they’d arranged her hands, and even her smile looked composed, in the wrong sense of the word. Miles wasn’t sure how you made someone smile after they were dead. Bethany didn’t look much like she had when she’d been alive. That had been only a few days ago. Now she seemed smaller, and also, oddly, larger. It was the nearest Miles had ever been to a dead person, and he stood there, looking at Bethany, wishing two things: that he was dead, too, and also that it had seemed appropriate to bring along his notebook and a pen. He felt he should be taking notes. After all, this was the most significant thing that had ever happened to Miles. A great change was occurring within him, moment by singular moment.
Poets were supposed to be in the moment, and also stand outside the moment, looking in. For example, Miles had never noticed before, but Bethany’s ears were slightly lopsi
ded. One was smaller and slightly higher up. Not that he would have cared, or written a poem about it, or even mentioned it to her, ever, in case it made her self-conscious, but it was a fact and now that he’d noticed it he thought it might have driven him crazy, not mentioning it: he bent over and kissed Bethany’s forehead, breathing in. She smelled like a new car. Miles’s mind was full of poetic thoughts. Every cloud had a silver lining, except there was probably a more interesting and meaningful way to say that, and death wasn’t really a cloud. He thought about what it was: more like an earthquake, maybe, or falling from a great height and smacking into the ground, really hard, which knocked the wind out of you and made it hard to sleep or wake up or eat or care about things like homework or whether there was anything good on TV. And death was foggy, too, but also prickly, so maybe instead of a cloud, a fog made of little sharp things. Needles. Every death fog has a lot of silver needles. Did that make sense? Did it scan?
Then the thought came to Miles like the tolling of a large and leaden bell that Bethany was dead. This may sound strange, but in my experience it’s strange and it’s also just how it works. You wake up and you remember that the person you loved is dead. And then you think: Really?
Then you think how strange it is, how you have to remind yourself that the person you loved is dead, and even while you’re thinking about that, the thought comes to you again that the person you loved is dead. And it’s the same stupid fog, the same needles or mallet to the intestines or whatever worse thing you want to call it, all over again. But you’ll see for yourself someday.
Miles stood there, remembering, until Bethany’s mother, Mrs. Baldwin, came up beside him. Her eyes were dry, but her hair was a mess. She’d only managed to put eye shadow on one eyelid. She was wearing jeans and one of Bethany’s old T-shirts. Not even one of Bethany’s favorite T-shirts. Miles felt embarrassed for her, and for Bethany, too.
“What’s that?” Mrs. Baldwin said. Her voice sounded rusty and outlandish, as if she were translating from some other language. Something Indo-Germanic, perhaps.
“My poems. Poems I wrote for her,” Miles said. He felt very solemn. This was a historic moment. One day Miles’s biographers would write about this. “Three haikus, a sestina, and two villanelles. Some longer pieces. No one else will ever read them.”
Mrs. Baldwin looked into Miles’s face with her terrible, dry eyes. “I see,” she said. “She said you were a lousy poet.” She put her hand down into the casket, smoothed Bethany’s favorite dress, the one with spider webs, and several holes through which you could see Bethany’s itchy black tights. She patted Bethany’s hands, and said, “Well, good-bye, old girl. Don’t forget to send a postcard.”
Don’t ask me what she meant by this. Sometimes Bethany’s mother said strange things. She was a lapsed Buddhist and a substitute math teacher. Once she’d caught Miles cheating on an algebra quiz. Relations between Miles and Mrs. Baldwin had not improved during the time that Bethany and Miles were dating, and Miles couldn’t decide whether or not to believe her about Bethany not liking his poetry. Substitute teachers had strange senses of humor when they had them at all.
He almost reached into the casket and took his poetry back. But Mrs. Baldwin would have thought that she’d proved something; that she’d won. Not that this was a situation where anyone was going to win anything. This was a funeral, not a game show. Nobody was going to get to take Bethany home.
Mrs. Baldwin looked at Miles and Miles looked back. Bethany wasn’t looking at anyone. The two people that Bethany had loved most in the world could see, through that dull hateful fog, what the other was thinking, just for a minute, and although you weren’t there and even if you had been you wouldn’t have known what they were thinking anyway, I’ll tell you. I wish it had been me, Miles thought. And Mrs. Baldwin thought, I wish it had been you, too.
Miles put his hands into the pockets of his new suit, turned, and left Mrs. Baldwin standing there. He went and sat next to his own mother, who was trying very hard not to cry. She’d liked Bethany. Everyone had liked Bethany. A few rows in front, a girl named April Lamb was picking her nose in some kind of frenzy of grief. When they got to the cemetery, there was another funeral service going on, the burial of the girl who had been in the other car, and the two groups of mourners glared at each other as they parked their cars and tried to figure out which grave site to gather around.
Two florists had misspelled Bethany’s name on the ugly wreaths, BERTHANY and also BETHONY, just like tribe members did when they were voting each other out on the television show Survivor, which had always been Bethany’s favorite thing about Survivor. Bethany had been an excellent speller, although the Lutheran minister who was conducting the sermon didn’t mention that.
Miles had an uncomfortable feeling: he became aware that he couldn’t wait to get home and call Bethany, to tell her all about this, about everything that had happened since she’d died. He sat and waited until the feeling wore off. It was a feeling he was getting used to.
Bethany had liked Miles because he made her laugh. He makes me laugh, too. Miles figured that digging up Bethany’s grave, even that would have made her laugh. Bethany had had a great laugh, which went up and up like a clarinetist on an escalator. It wasn’t annoying. It had been delightful, if you liked that kind of laugh. It would have made Bethany laugh that Miles Googled grave digging in order to educate himself. He read an Edgar Allan Poe story, he watched several relevant episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he bought Vicks VapoRub, which you were supposed to apply under your nose. He bought equipment at Target: a special, battery-operated, telescoping shovel, a set of wire cutters, a flashlight, extra batteries for the shovel and flashlight, and even a Velcro headband with a headlamp that came with a special red lens filter, so that you were less likely to be noticed.
Miles printed out a map of the cemetery so that he could find his way to Bethany’s grave off Weeping Fish Lane, even—as an acquaintance of mine once remarked—“in the dead of night when naught can be seen, so pitch is the dark.” (Not that the dark would be very pitch. Miles had picked a night when the moon would be full.) The map was also just in case, because he’d seen movies where the dead rose from their graves. You wanted to have all the exits marked in a situation like that.
He told his mother that he was spending the night at his friend John’s house. He told his friend John not to tell his mother anything.
If Miles had Googled “poetry” as well as “digging up graves,” he would have discovered that his situation was not without precedent. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti also buried his poetry with his dead lover. Rossetti, too, had regretted this gesture, had eventually decided to dig up his lover to get back his poems. I’m telling you this so that you never make the same mistake.
I can’t tell you whether Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a better poet than Miles, although Rossetti had a sister, Christina Rossetti, who was really something. But you’re not interested in my views on poetry. I know you better than that, even if you don’t know me. You’re waiting for me to get to the part about grave digging.
Miles had a couple of friends and he thought about asking someone to come along on the expedition. But no one except for Bethany knew that Miles wrote poetry. And Bethany had been dead for a while. Eleven months, in fact, which was one month longer than Bethany had been Miles’s girlfriend. Long enough that Miles was beginning to make his way out of the fog and the needles. Long enough that he could listen to certain songs on the radio again. Long enough that sometimes there was something dreamlike about his memories of Bethany, as if she’d been a movie that he’d seen a long time ago, late at night on television. Long enough that when he tried to reconstruct the poems he’d written her, especially the villanelle, which had been, in his opinion, really quite good, he couldn’t. It was as if when he’d put those poems into the casket, he hadn’t just given Bethany the only copies of some poems, but had instead given away those shining, perfect lines, given them away so tho
roughly that he’d never be able to write them out again. Miles knew that Bethany was dead. There was nothing to do about that. But the poetry was different. You have to salvage what you can, even if you’re the one who buried it in the first place.
You might think at certain points in this story that I’m being hard on Miles, that I’m not sympathetic to his situation. This isn’t true. I’m as fond of Miles as I am of anyone else. I don’t think he’s any stupider or any bit less special or remarkable than—for example—you. Anyone might accidentally dig up the wrong grave. It’s a mistake anyone could make.
The moon was full and the map was easy to read even without the aid of the flashlight. The cemetery was full of cats. Don’t ask me why. Miles was not afraid. He was resolute. The battery-operated telescoping shovel at first refused to untelescope. He’d tested it in his own backyard, but here, in the cemetery, it seemed unbearably loud. It scared off the cats for a while, but it didn’t draw any unwelcome attention. The cats came back. Miles set aside the moldering wreaths and bouquets, and then he used his wire cutters to trace a rectangle. He stuck the telescoping shovel under and pried up fat squares of sod above Bethany’s grave. He stacked them up like carpet samples and got to work.
By two a.m., Miles had knotted a length of rope at short, regular intervals for footholds, and then looped it around a tree, so he’d be able to climb out of the grave again, once he’d retrieved his poetry. He was waist-deep in the hole he’d made. The night was warm and he was sweating. It was hard work, directing the shovel. Every once in a while it telescoped while he was using it. He’d borrowed his mother’s gardening gloves to keep from getting blisters, but still his hands were getting tired. The gloves were too big. His arms ached.
By three thirty, Miles could no longer see out of the grave in any direction except up. A large white cat came and peered down at Miles, grew bored and left again. The moon moved over Miles’s head like a spotlight. He began to wield the shovel more carefully. He didn’t want to damage Bethany’s casket. When the shovel struck something that was not dirt, Miles remembered that he’d left the Vicks VapoRub on his bed at home. He improvised with a cherry ChapStick he found in his pocket. Now he used his garden-gloved hands to dig and to smooth dirt away. The bloody light emanating from his Velcro headband picked out the ingenious telescoping ridges of the discarded shovel, the little rocks and worms and worm-like roots that poked out of the dirt walls of Miles’s excavation, the smoother lid of Bethany’s casket.
