Shallow Graves

by Kali Wallace

  I thought: Mom and Dad would be so disappointed.

  They had always told us there was no such thing as ghosts. No ghosts or spirits, no heaven or hell, no afterlife. When my youngest sister, Sunny, asked what happened to us when we died, our middle sister, Meadow, had scoffed and said, “You rot and worms eat your brain, stupid.” Mom and Dad had hushed her, told her not to frighten Sunny, and they had explained that all that remained were the memories our loved ones carried with them and the impact of the things we had accomplished. Nothing in their view of the world allowed for the possibility of ghosts in empty intersections, shadows clinging to murderers, or the half-dead thing I had become.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The ghost had no face. It drifted in the breeze, like a tattered flag on a pole, but it gave no sign that it had heard me. It didn’t come closer. It didn’t move away. It didn’t do anything. I walked around it in a slow circle; it didn’t turn.

  I reached out to touch it. It felt like nothing at all, not even a cool puff of air. It had dark smears where its eyes ought to be.

  I stopped bothering the ghost and headed west along the road again. When I looked back, it was still there, a pale drift above the road, tiny in the dark prairie night.

  SIX

  THE NIGHT I DIED was warm and clear. I remember joking with Melanie when we slammed the doors of her mom’s car, the minivan with the stick-figure family displayed on the back window. Two parents, two kids, two dogs. I remember laughing as we dodged sprinklers on somebody’s lawn and slipped on the grass. Everything was laughter and light and fun. There was nothing before us but our last summer of high school stretching long and open.

  Later she would recoil, and my face would sting where she slapped me, and I would leave the party alone.

  Later still I would grow cold and stiff in a backyard grave, but I don’t remember that.

  On the day I came back to life, hundreds of birds within a two-mile radius dropped dead with no warning and a freak storm covered the city with frost.

  I don’t remember much of the year in between.

  I don’t remember the police, the searches, the interviews. I don’t remember the headlines: EVANSTON TEEN MISSING. I don’t remember the articles: “Breezy Lin, 17, was reported missing by parents David Lin and Erin Donahue after she failed to return home from a party on Saturday night.” I don’t remember the interviews, the speculation, the online comments, the inevitable school assembly. I don’t remember my parents giving press conferences, my sisters beside them. Sunny cried and Meadow scowled while Mom and Dad held my picture and pleaded, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember that picture appearing every night on the local news: last year’s school photo, taken when my hair was longer and I was wearing an electric blue shirt I had since given to Meadow. I don’t remember the posters stapled up around town. I don’t remember the police dogs barking and tugging through the neighborhood.

  They had no chance of finding me. I don’t smell like myself anymore. I’m too degraded.

  I don’t remember any of it. I read about it afterward.

  You don’t sleep when you’re dead, but you can dream. During that year I lay buried in my grave, I dreamed about darkness and space and silence. During that year, I was alone.

  I always wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Not in the casual, halfhearted way all kids want to be astronauts when they go through their drawing-pictures-of-Saturn phase, but truly, earnestly. I was going to be a member of the first manned mission to Mars.

  I decided when I was seven, and when I was eleven I worked it all out: the classes I would take in high school and what I would study in college, how long it would take me to get my PhD in astrophysics or planetary geology or engineering, the research projects I would do, the grants and internships I would get, all of it with the space program in mind. I seriously considered joining the air force but decided a career in scientific research was a better option. I had a long-term plan and a carefully annotated schedule in my desk drawer. I convinced my teachers to let me create independent math courses so I would already know calculus by the time I enrolled at MIT. I signed up for swimming lessons so I could ace NASA’s swimming requirement. I wrote practice answers to imaginary interview questions. I asked my parents if I could go on a parabolic flight for vacation rather than our usual summer at the cottage on Lake Michigan. I had files and calendars and an entire shelf full of astronaut biographies. I had a map of Mars on my bedroom wall, another of the moon, and a space shuttle poster signed by Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. I had a T-shirt with a drawing of the cosmonaut dog Laika and would tell anybody who asked all about how she had died a horrible death alone and in pain above the earth.

  Melanie said it was creepy that I knew that and I probably shouldn’t talk about it if I wanted to keep my friends. I thought twice about wearing my Laika T-shirt after that, but I didn’t stop. I just wore it when Melanie wasn’t around.

  A future in space was the only thing I had ever wanted.

  My parents encouraged me. They were proud of my dreams and my determination. They told me I could do it, and I believed them.

  I imagined hundreds of times what it would be like to float above the earth, a clear marble of green and blue and white below me, the stars at my back, specks of light in the cold and the silence, and the vast, incomprehensible beauty of the universe. Every astronaut, every cosmonaut, all the women and men who have gone into space, they all say the same thing: they went up expecting to be awed by the moon and the sun and the stars, but what astonished them most was the earth. Michael Collins, the astronaut who orbited the moon in the Apollo 11 Command Module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left footprints on the surface, once said that what he thought when he looked down at the earth was, “My god, that little thing is so fragile out there.”

  Being dead isn’t like that.

  Unfamiliar white stars pinpricked the darkness all around me, tiny and bright and impossibly distant. There was no earth, no moon, no sun. No strange planets wrapped in rings. No colorful nebulas or vast clouds of gas. Only stars.

  No matter which way I turned, drifting and spinning helplessly in slow circles, nothing new ever came into view. My heart wasn’t beating. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t think about anything.

  The year passed, but I didn’t feel it. All I felt was cold.

  I didn’t know I was waking up until it had already happened.

  The birds started dying after midnight. The first people to notice were the early morning birders out before dawn, armed with their notebooks and binoculars, wrapped in scarves and puffy down coats against the surprise cold. They saw their blue jays and orioles and herons all struck dead on their migration north. The bird-watchers called animal control, and animal control called an environmental consultant, and the consultant called a wildlife biologist, and before the morning was over dozens of little feathered bodies were packed away in plastic bags and coolers and carried off to be tested. All over the city people were checking their backyards and gutters and warning their kids not to touch the corpses. In homes and pet stores, parakeets and finches and parrots were dropping dead in their cages.

  The frost melted away before noon, and the birds kept dying. On the news a scientist insisted the freak cold snap had nothing to do with it, never mind that it was the middle of June and Illinois was ready for summer.

  The last birds died just before midnight, and I came back.

  One moment I was in the darkness, surrounded by stars, and the next I was coughing and choking. I couldn’t move. There was something crushing me from all sides. When I tried to open my eyes, I felt a sharp, stinging pain. I couldn’t see. The stars were gone, and there was no light. I tried to breathe, my lungs heaving and burning, but my mouth and throat were packed with dirt.

  I kicked and clawed, and slowly, slowly, the soil above me loosened. I wasn’t buried very deep. Eighteen inches, no more, but I was so weak I couldn’t break through to the surface. I was thrashing and squirming, t
rying to push the soil away, and that’s when I felt the man’s hands on my face and heard his excited whispers.

  Somebody besides the birders and the scientists had noticed the dying birds. Somebody who recognized the signs and knew that no natural weather phenomenon was responsible.

  I grabbed his wrists. A thick, nauseating darkness washed over me, more suffocating than the soil, oily and slick and sickening.

  I thought: killer.

  I thought: murderer.

  I only had to touch him and I knew what he was. I was holding his wrists, but it wasn’t his flesh and bone I was feeling. It was the sick slippery guilt inside the meat shell.

  I pulled without thinking, without hesitating, and he snapped. He was there one moment and gone the next. A lightning bolt of memories and blood and exhilaration exploded through me.

  My heart shuddered, squeezed, began to beat again.

  I hauled myself out of the grave. I fell onto my hands and knees, heaving and vomiting. I began to shiver. I was crying, tears streaking down my face, painful sobs shaking my body. I dug my fingers into my mouth to clear the dirt away, gagged and vomited again until my stomach ached and my throat burned.

  I wiped a hand over my mouth and looked at the man lying on the ground. I checked his pulse because I thought I should, not because I didn’t already know. His face was turned into the grass. He had a spot of thinning hair on the back of his head.

  He had killed five people one winter night thirty years ago.

  My ears rang with gunshots and screams. A woman’s pleading voice. Only after several gasping minutes did the images soften, the smells fade, and I understood it was a memory.

  I didn’t feel weak anymore, but the nausea lingered. My blood was humming in my veins and my lips tingled. I spat on the grass; there was dirt in my teeth. My heart was thundering in my chest. I could feel the air filling my lungs, the muscles of my abdomen clenching, the nerves in my skin waking and pricking with pain. I could feel all of it. The awareness was overwhelming. In the darkness, surrounded by distant stars, there had been no time, but now I was counting the seconds with every breath and every heartbeat.

  I breathed until my head stopped spinning. Every gulp of cold air was the best thing I had ever tasted. I lifted my head, waited to make sure I wasn’t going to topple over, and stood.

  I was in the backyard of a two-story house. There was no light through the back door or any of the windows. Somewhere nearby dogs were barking, angry and insistent. I realized I had been hearing them for some time.

  I crossed the lawn, fumbled at the gate, pushed it open.

  I kicked something soft and looked down: a little bird, still and brown and dead. I stared at it, waiting for a pang of revulsion, but I felt nothing. I brushed over its feathers with my bare toes. It was such a tiny thing, barely the size of my fist.

  My eyes were gritty with dirt, scraping with every blink, but I recognized the neighborhood. I was only a couple of blocks from home.

  SEVEN

  IT BEGAN TO RAIN as dawn crept over western Nebraska. Within minutes I was soaked through, head to toe, but it was another few miles before I skated into a small town and found shelter in the local McDonald’s.

  My shoes skidded on the tile floor when I stepped inside. Shivering with cold, I went into the bathroom to change into the clothes I had taken from a Laundromat before leaving Chicago. The jeans were so long I had to roll them up, and the Wonder Woman T-shirt was meant for a little girl with a flat chest. I couldn’t do anything about the shoes; I didn’t have another pair. I finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, wrung out my scarf, and wrapped it again around my neck. It was clammy and uncomfortable, but it was better than letting people stare at the bruises.

  My grandmother used to say, “You look like death warmed over,” when my mother was tired or sick or worn down. I always thought it was a funny thing to say; I imagined coffins lined up on a baking sheet, sprinkled with sugar and frosting and ready to go into the oven. Grandma Elaine had died when I was eight. We went to San Francisco for her funeral, an open casket service, and I remember looking down at her thin white hair and pale face, stiff and unnatural beneath the heavy makeup, and knowing better than to ask my mother if it was time for Grandma to be warmed up now. It was cold in San Francisco that spring, rainy and gray everywhere we went, and I was worried Grandma would feel that way forever.

  I didn’t look like death warmed over. My face wasn’t going gray. My skin wasn’t shriveling up. My nails weren’t yellowing and long. There were no hollow holes of rot opening in my face. I looked like a drowned rat in ill-fitting vagrant-chic clothes, but otherwise I looked like myself. There was a faint flush to my cheeks and my eyes were bright. I looked alive.

  The cashier behind the counter raised her eyebrows when I walked up to order. “Get caught out?” she said.

  “A little bit,” I said.

  “What can I get for you?”

  “A small coffee, please.” I dug into my backpack for the twenty the friendly stoner had given to me when we parted ways in Iowa City.

  “And?” She was a middle-aged woman with graying hair and deep lines around her eyes. Her fingers twitched over the register.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  I can’t eat anymore. Everything tastes like dust.

  I walked to a seat by the window. My shoes squelched. I felt the familiar tug as I passed a group of old men and women chatting over coffee and Styrofoam plates of pancakes: killer, killer. Their shadows were old and frail, spider-web wispy. The men were veterans. One of them was wearing a POW/MIA hat, another a US Navy jacket.

  One of the old women, too: killer.

  That would have surprised me before, when I was first feeling out the limits of my new sense, but an old lady in a pink cardigan is just as likely to be a murderer as anybody else.

  The woman caught me staring. I turned away.

  The rain showed no sign of letting up. Trucks passing on the interstate sent waves of water over the guardrails. I sat at my table by the window and shivered. I tried not to think too much about what I was doing and where I was going. I would worry about that when the rain stopped.

  I took the notebook out of my backpack and unhooked the pen from the spiral. I turned to the third page and wrote: Duncan Palmer. Little boy with a baseball bat.

  I breathed in the scent of the coffee to chase away the phantom smell of peanut butter.

  The only other words on the page were: Man by grave. Family of five with shotgun and knife.

  One didn’t mean anything, but two was a body count. I was tempted to number them, neat digits at the front of each line, but I didn’t want 1 and 2 to imply there would be a 3 and 4.

  Instead I turned to a clean page and drew a long vertical line down the middle, another line across the top. At the top of one column I wrote REAL, and atop the other I wrote NOT REAL.

  On the first line of the first column I wrote: Whatever I am.

  Below that: Ghosts.

  The Not Real column remained empty for now.

  I drank my dust-flavored coffee as slowly as I could, but soon the cup was empty. It was still raining, I was cold and filthy and uncomfortable, and I smelled like a bum who had been sleeping in a Dumpster. There was grime underneath my fingernails, and my hair was tangled in knots. The nighttime exhilaration of racing along country roads in the darkness was gone. I wasn’t sure how long I could hang around McDonald’s before the employees asked me to leave.

  I found Danny’s blue flier, unfolded the paper, and smoothed it down on the tabletop. Church of the Prairie. I had no idea where I was in relation to that cross on the map. Nebraska had a lot of prairie and a lot of churches. I didn’t need help. I definitely didn’t need a hot meal. But a shower and clean clothes would be nice.

  I grabbed the flier and walked over to the table of old men and women.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I held out the blue paper and tried to look as pathetic as possible. “I didn’t mean to bother you
, but I was wondering . . . Do you know where this is? Is it near here?”

  One of the women smiled. It was a kindly grandmother’s smile, crinkling up her face and warming her eyes. I wondered who she had killed. Her guilt was delicate and sharp, like brittle rose thorns in an old, old garden.

  “It’s not too close, sweetie, but it’s not too far either,” she said.

  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  She took the flier from me. “Oh, we can’t let you go out in that storm again. You’re so little you’ll get swept away.”

  They all laughed, and I laughed too. They invited me to have a seat. I looked harmless.

  EIGHT

  I DECIDED SHORTLY after waking up that I needed to take a rational approach to figuring out what happened to me. The first page of my notebook contains the record of that brief burst of scientific enthusiasm.

  On the top line in block letters I wrote: RESEARCH.

  And beneath it:

  Preliminary research indicates that subject is not a living human person anymore. A review of the available literature is unclear on whether this state is permanent.

  By “review of the available literature” I meant I had googled “how do I not be undead anymore” and come up empty.

  Subject is still able to breathe, but respiration is not necessary. A similar situation persists with the circulatory system. The subject’s heart will beat if instructed to do so, and sometimes when subject is not paying attention. There are no negative consequences to stopping the blood flow. Experimental evidence suggests this state can persist for at least six hours and forty-two minutes. Longer time periods have not yet been investigated as the subject grows bored with testing. In spite of the intermittent blood flow, there are bruises on the subject’s skin that have not faded and show no signs of healing or yellowing. The bruises are arranged in a ring around the subject’s neck. The pattern of bruising suggests the injury occurred