If Love is a Red Dress – Hang Me in Rags
By Michael J. Solender
Perhaps you should rest now Del. Wearied bones make for weighty ascent.
Rest? I don’t think I’m up for any rest just now. What difference would it make? My mind won’t stop racing. Her vision will never escape my memory. So at peace, so much at ease. Her pallor shone bright against the ruby redness of her dress.
There’s no point in replaying those events over and over, Del. I implore you – put your focus forward. Making peace with the past will allow for a much better transition. You’ll be forgiven. Acceptance is the first step.
Forgiveness offers no absolution. There is no amnesty for the likes of me. I accept nothing. Whoever accepted me? She didn’t accept me. I was simply a vehicle for her. She saw my vulnerability and worked to exploit me. I trusted her. I let her into my soul, she saw my essence and being, she touched my core. I felt alive and then. Then…
Yes Del? What happened then?
Was it theater? I don’t know for certain. Her gaze fell upon my face as the curtain drops at the end of an act. With certainty and definition. She lay bare before me and asked me to take her. She was not brave enough to do it herself so she asked me to do it for her. What could I do? How could I say no? I was under her spell.
You didn’t mean to harm her?
Harm? Harm? I tried to push her away but she came back like a letter with insufficient postage. Was truncating her torment harm? Was arresting her daily demons harm? Was swathing her in the elegance of the dress rouge harmful? I loved her. I was willing to do anything for her. When I breathed I took in her womanhood and it filled me with life anew. I never knew such a feeling until I met her. I knew extinguishing her light would befall me with darkness. It was worth it. It was so very right. Why can’t anyone see that?
But Del, why did you take her life?
Wasn’t she murdered when at nine she was raped by her stepfather? Wasn’t she again murdered when two years later the court awarded her custody to the very same monster after her mother died? If murder is taking a life, then she was murdered a thousand times over the next fifteen years until she met me. The courts, the schools, her series of “custodians” – all murderous and soul-sucking leeches. I was a giver of life, eternal life and salvation. I was only too glad to sacrifice my life for her.
Are you hungry? I can arrange for anything if you’d like.
I’ll never taste sweetness again. It all is tasteless, gray and cast without succor. I want nothing. I want to waltz into the void. I want to feel the absence, feel the emptiness, and be surrounded by the nocturne. Is that what it’s like, Father?
It’s glorious if you accept Him, Del. That is the only thing I’m sure of. Won’t you accept Him, my son, and free yourself of this burden?
No Father, I can’t turn there for consolation. I’ll find it with her. I’ll hang the way she hung. I’ll die the way she died. I’ll traverse the passage with lightness. We’ll embrace in the beyond. I’ll bathe with her in her red dress, we’ll find eternity together. I’m ready now Father, we can go.
Yes Del, may the Lord have mercy upon you.
***
Guard! Guard! The prisoner is ready.
-
Michael J. Solender is the author of the short story and poetry chapbook, Last Winter"3">hs Leaves, published by Full of Crow Press. His essay, “Unaffiliated,” is featured in the newly released anthology, Topograph: New Writings From The Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond, published by Novello Festival Press. He is the editor of the online magazine, On The Wing. Solender’s work is found at michaeljwrites.com and his blog, NOT FROM HERE, ARE YOU?
A Corpse by Any Other Name
By Naomi Johnson
Lucian put his El Dorado in park. Holding onto the wheel with the hook at the end of his left arm, he turned to face Mackie in the passenger seat and gave him a “you best not be fucking with me” look. It made Mackie glad he wasn’t fucking with Lucian.
“He’s really dead.”
Both men twisted to look at the man in the back. Frank Murray, an elderly white guy garbed in a limp flannel shirt and faded bib overalls, had indeed shuffled off his mortal coil. His eyes were glassed over, his skin an unhealthy ash tone, and his mouth hung slack. He was a collapsed balloon of a corpse, slumped across the back seat, not caring anymore about getting home to his frightened wife and hungry dog.
“Well, he’s dead, all right,” Lucian observed. “Must’ve had a heart attack. Goddamn.”
“Now what?” Mackie asked.
Lucian shrugged and faced forward again. “We go tell Mr. McCrea. Grabbing Murray was his idea.”
***
Marty McCrea pinched the creases in his slacks and pulled up on the material as he bent over and peered into the rear of the El Dorado. He stared, blinked. Then: “I thought you said Murray was dead?”
“If he ain’t dead he’s gon’ win a fucking Oscar,” Lucian said.
McCrea stood up, a full eight inches shorter than Lucian, but when he stabbed his cigar in Lucian’s general direction, both Lucian and Mackie edged back. McCrea was notorious for indicating his displeasure via the lit end of his fifty-dollar smokes. An observant man never took his eye off the cigar when conversing with McCrea. But even an observant man had a hard time watching the cigar while also keeping that same eye out for double-crosses and .45s.
“Oh, yeah, this guy’s d ead for sure. You boys know dead when you see it, I’ll give you that. But what this guy ain’t, he ain’t Frank Murray. Didn’t I tell you, grab Frank Murray and bring him to me? Did I tell you, grab some clodhopper and kill him and bring me his lifeless piece-of-shit corpse? Did I tell you to do that?”
The glowing stogie was waving around and Lucian and Mackie kept edging away and trying not to look concerned. Mackie just couldn’t keep quiet though.
“It is so Frank Murray, boss. We looked him up on White Pages dot com and then we MapQuested him. And then,” he declared with no small degree of pride in their foresight, “we asked him before we grabbed him, was he Frank Murray and he said yes.”
“No, you moron, no,” McCrea caught Mackie on his bare arm with the lit end of the stogie. Mackie shrieked and jumped away. “There are many Frank Murrays in this world, but there is only one I care about and that’s the Frank Murray. The Frank Murray on the zoning board who’s been taking my money all these years; the Frank Murray who’s now ratting me out to the feds; the Frank Murray who’s going to get what’s coming to him when you two rutabagas get your heads out of your asses and go grab the right fucking Frank Murray!”
Mackie stopped blowing on his arm long enough to cast a worried glance at Lucian. “I’m pretty sure that one ain’t listed on White Pages dot com.”
Lucian ignored him. “So what do you want us to do with Murray, boss?”
“I told you! Grab him and bring him to me!” McCrea popped the cigar back into his mouth and adjusted the black band on his left sleeve.
“Not that Frank Murray,” Lucian said. “This Frank Murray.” He jerked his hook toward the El Dorado.
McCrea gritted his teeth, nearly cutting the stogie in two. “I don’t give a fuck,” he growled. “Bury him someplace nobody will ever look for him. He’s your problem, not mine.”
***
The moon was hidden by cloud cover as a black hearse crept along winding drive of St. Joseph Memorial Garden. Mackie wasn’t happy because Lucian had made him turn off the headlights and use only the parking lights inside the cemetery.
“I don’t get why we’re putting Frank Murray here,” Mackie whined. “A cemetery of all places. Mr. McCrea said bury him where nobody will look for him. People come here all the time.”
“Exactly,” said Lucian. “A place full of dead bodies. Nobody ever comes here looking for a dead body ’cause they already know there’s tons of ’em here.”
“Somebody works here is gonna notice a grave where there hadn’t ought to be one,” Mackie pointed out.
The light dawned on Mackie. “You’re fuckin’ brilliant, Lucian.”
“Don’t swear in a cemetery. That’s bad luck.”
“Yeah? I never knew that. It’s a great idea anyway, but how’s come we needed a coffin? We could just dump the body in the hole and cover it over. Don’t see why we needed a coffin.”
“Ain’t you got no respect, Mackie?” Lucian was disgusted. “This is a cemetery, man, and a Catholic cemetery at that. This is a sacred burial ground. You got to treat the dead right in a place like this. Can’t be treating ’em like that guy we left at the dump or that meatball that went into the new dam.”
“I never thought of it that way, Loosh. You’re a thinking man, you know, that’s what I like about you. I get smarter just by sitting next to you. Man, I can’t see for shit. Sorry. I mean I can’t see much without no lights. That looks like a pile of dirt maybe.”
“That is for sure a pile of dirt, and that means there’s a big empty hole next to it waiting to be filled. Pull over and grab a shovel.”
But the earth at the bottom of the six-foot-deep hole was more resistant to a shovel than Lucian had anticipated. And then getting the dirt out of the grave turned out to be a small engineering feat in itself, because flinging a shovelful of dirt over their heads and to one side was easier said than done. After nearly knocking each other senseless with the shovels, they finally worked out a system that was slowed by a couple of boulders. Those had to be dug up and hauled out, a sweaty and exhausting job. And all of this they accomplished by the slowly fading illumination provided by a pair of flashlights. The batteries failed completely just as a brief but heavy rain around four a.m. left the footing in the pit messy and treacherous. It was after six a.m. when a worn and muddy Mackie asked, “Hey, Lucian. How will we know when we’re deep enough?”
Lucian thrust the shovel blade into the mud and said flatly, “We’re done.”
They argued briefly, but without heat, on how best to extricate themselves from a hole now considerably deeper than either of them were tall but after some grunting and hauling, Lucian at last was able to say, “Okay, let’s put the box in.”
“Can’t we rest for a minute?” Mackie groaned. “I got blisters and my back is killing me. And I got to piss or go crazy.”
A brief respite was agreed on, and while Mackie ambled away to baptize the statue of an angel guarding a lamb, Lucian stretched out on a patch of grass behind the mounds of dirt. The sun was just coming up in the eastern sky and birds chorused greetings to the day. Just as Lucian was thinking about getting up and finding out where Mackie had got to, he fell asleep.
***
“Holy fuck! Lucian, wake up! Wake up!”
Lucian did not feel like waking up and so he swiped his hook in the general direction of Mackie’s voice.
“Ow! I said wake the fuck up. Lucian, man, c’mon. It’s almost ten-thirty and we still got to get Frank Murray in the ground. Lucian!”
Instantly Lucian was wide awake, standing up straighter and prouder than his first erection, his face a rictus of panic. His head darted from side to side. His stiffened muscles cried out in pain but he was too scared to listen.
“Anyone around? Any witnesses?” He was breathing deeply, as though he had just run a foot race.
“I think some people were here. I heard voices. That’s what woke me up. But I reckon they either left or they went on to the back section.”
Adrenaline lent speed and informality to Frank Murray’s last rites. Mackie tamped down the last shovelful just as Lucian said, “That ought to do it.”
Lucian gave him a hand – the hand – getting out of the grave, and the two men stood there, mud-daubed and exhausted, leaning on their shovels and admiring their handiwork.
“That was more work than I reckoned,” Lucian admitted. “I’m sorry ’bout that.”
Mackie nodded, but defended his friend to himself. “But a great idea. I never would have come up with it.” He squinted into the morning light. “Just in time, too. Looks like we got company.”
A line of cars, each vehicle with a purple flag fluttering from its aerial, wound its way around the road that curved through the cemetery. The lead car was a shiny black hearse, a twin to the stolen vehicle Lucian had remembered to move out of sight only minutes earlier.
“Reckon they got a roommate for Frank Murray?” Mackie wondered.
“Could be. Let’s back off a few feet and give ’em room.”
The hearse came to a smooth stop and the erstwhile diggers observed in silence as a glossy white casket containing Frank Murray’s new roommate was neatly maneuvered from the vehicle and into place above the grave. Wreathes and baskets of flowers appeared. Mourners exited their cars and straggled to the graveside.
Mackie nudged his partner, who was eyeing some overturned headstones and graffitied crypts off to his left. “Don’t that look like Jimmy the Skunk’s car? That red Chevy?”
Lucian agreed that it did but added, “Keep still, the priest is about to start.”
It seemed to Mackie that the holy man went on far longer than necessary, and it wasn’t even all in English. Bored, he chose to people-watch and soon enough he spotted a familiar face.
“Hey, that is Jimmy the Skunk! I never would’ve believed it, Jimmy the Skunk at a funeral. I ain’t never seen him anywhere but on a barstool. See him? Right there next to Mr. McCrea?”
Lucian’s stiff muscles got stiffer.
“No shit, Lucian, look. It’s Mr. McCrea. Guess he’ll be glad to know we got this here Frank Murray taken care of. You know, I forgot all about his mom’s funeral being today. Guess we should have been there, huh?”
“We are there.” Lucian didn’t know how he got the words out, as locked as his jaw was. Lucian’s gaze was locked, too, right on McCrea who wiped his eyes and looked up, as though he felt the weight of Lucian’s attention. The boss wore the tortured expression of a man lost in grief.
Lucian and Mackie watched as McCrea’s blank stare of grief slowly tightened and focused directly on Lucian and Mackie. The boss’s stare went up and down them, taking in their muddy apparel and responding to the sight with a scowl of disapproval as if to say, “This is not how you dress for a funeral.”
Mackie gave a little wave.
McCrea took in the shovels at their feet, appeared confused by the presence of tools. He turned his gaze to his late mother’s casket, to the hole below it. Looked up again at Lucian and Mackie. Down again at the grave. In slow motion, his hand fumbled for the gun that was not strapped on because a man did not take guns to his mother’s funeral. Then he searched his pockets for the cigar that was not in his mouth because one did not smoke at a graveside service. And he turned a face mottled purple with anger once more to the spot where Mackie and Lucian stood.
Had stood.
***
“We got to get Frank Murray out of that grave and we got to let Mr. McCrea know we took care of it. And then we got to hope for the best.” But Lucian thought any prospects “for the best” were dim – at best.
“He ain’t going to like it if we dig up his mom’s grave,” Mackie resisted. “And I ain’t shovel-crazy myself. Why don’t we not dig up Frank Murray and say we did?”
“And what if he wants proof?”
A pause.
“Think we could get a couple guys to help dig?” Mackie suggested.
“I think you’re stupid is what I think. You want the whole world to know about this? Right now the only ones know is you and me and Mr. McCr
ea. And that’s already one person too many.”
Mackie mulled that over for a minute, scratched his nose, then said, “You think we should grab McCrea?”
Lucian stared bug-eyed at him. “I think you gone crazy, Mackie, clean out of your tiny fucking mind. How would we do that, him with bodyguards and all?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s out,” Mackie agreed with some reluctance. Then his face brightened. “Anyway, if we did grab McCrea, we’d have to dig a grave for him, too, so I guess every cloud has a silver lining. I’m in favor of anything that don’t involve shovels.”
Lucian took a half-hearted swipe at him with the hook, but he was thinking what to do about the late Frank Murray. “You ever use a backhoe, Mackie?”
***
Lucian had told a clerk at the Home Depot that he needed to move a big rock in order to plant a tree, and the clerk had very helpfully worked out a system of chains and pulleys powered by a winch. It took three trips for Mackie to steal everything that was needed, and Lucian took care of getting the backhoe. Neither of them had ever used such a machine but they figured out the basics fast enough that they managed to get some sleep before heading out to the cemetery again.
On this night, clear skies revealed a nearly full moon. And careful planning paid off, Lucian noted, because they had both caskets out of the ground in less than two hours. Mackie was delighted to be given a break so soon, and Lucian was delighted after Mackie dug around in the stolen hearse and came back with a bucket of KFC and a six-pack. They sat on the edge of the pit, chewing and swallowing, and feeling pretty good about working things out with Mr. McCrea.
That was until Mackie tossed the empties and the chicken bones into the grave, stood up, stretched, and eyed the twin white caskets.
“Okay,” he said, “back to work. Boy, these coffins look just alike, don’t they? Which one goes back in the ground?”
Lucian stared at the boxes, realized that they were indeed just alike.
“Muthaf –” A dismayed Lucian remembered just in time not to swear in a cemetery. “Which one did we take out last?”
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