The Beautiful Dead

by Banner, Daryl

  To my surprise, she tells me there is electricity, but nothing seems to work very well. Especially when we draw near anything electrical. She wouldn't elaborate further. Oh, and she says there's running water more or less, but it isn't good for our kind. I ask what she means and she says, “Think, like magnets of opposing poles. Whatever you might call natural, we are its opposite.”

  What a comfort she is, this Helena person.

  Breathing and eating and dieting and exercising and taking vitamins and rubbing age-defying creams all over ourselves ... that’s all so obsolete now. It’s unnecessary to maintain our dead selves. So last-season, says Helena, the idea of dieticians and trainers and doctors.

  "But if you absolutely need one," she says, pointing down the street, "there's a clever pair of men who run a gym. One of them had their Waking not too long ago, discovered he was a bodybuilder in his Old Life. The other was a surgeon—his name is Collin. So depressed he became, when he realized all his knowledge of health is for naught in this dark new world … Darling, please pretend to have a heart attack at some point, or perhaps a little summer cold. Indigestion. A rash. He would so very much appreciate the attention, even if it’s not real.”

  Life was so unnecessarily difficult. Only here in death, she explains, is anyone truly at peace.

  Sorry Helena, I feel anything but peaceful. It must show on my face because she looks particularly annoyed as she presents me to a cluster of houses at the west edge of town. “This one,” she says with a little nod, “is yours.”

  And then we’re standing on its creaky little porch. I peer around, afraid to touch anything. It all looks so old.

  “You can try to smile,” Helena suggests stiffly. She puts a calming hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off. “You should rest,” she tells me, peeved a bit by my rudeness. “When you wake, you’ll see how happy we are. You have no Earthly burdens anymore. Like a job, or a husband, or a family, or—”

  “How’s that mean anything to me,” I argue, “if I don’t even remember the family or husband or job I might’ve had? What if—What if I was happy with my life?”

  “Oh, please,” she snaps, her whole tone going sour. “Who in their right mind would turn down an eternity where you own a house, no responsibility, no bills to pay, and enjoy endless time to do whatever it is you desire? Seriously, girl, open your cold dead eyes.”

  I return her tirade with a blank stare. I’m silent as the so-called heart housed in my chest somewhere ... the one that doesn’t pump blood, cold as a stone, no purpose being there at all as far as I’m concerned.

  Seeing my forlorn expression, she huffs irritably and says, “Have it your way. Enjoy the scenery of Trenton, your new hometown, or don’t. Meet some people or keep entirely to yourself. Return to your grave and rot, I haven’t a care. My task here is done.” She turns away and descends the porch steps in her clicking jet-black heels.

  “Your task?”

  Without missing a step or turning back, strutting away she calls out, “You may someday be chosen, miss Winter, and you’ll be made to do your first Raising whether you like it or not. Then you’ll know the pain of bringing a sniveling ungrateful girl into this wonderful world. It’s like childbirth, but infinitely more regrettable.”

  Her black locks of hair swinging, she disappears into the misty city.

  I drop into a rocking chair, thankful it’s there to catch me. Had it not been, I would’ve fallen clean to the ground. Not that it matters. At this rate, I might as well drop dead into a hole. Words don’t fool me … Undead is still dead. There is no convincing me otherwise. I’ve kissed Life goodbye without a flinch of my cold dead lips.

  Sniveling ungrateful girl, she called me.

  I look out from the porch of my forever-home, only to witness two people break into dance in the middle of the street for no reason. Maybe I should smile, but the sight of them annoys the hell out of me. I look away and see three middle-aged women taking a calm stroll together. If I take for granted that all of this may actually be happening to me, that I may truly be Undead, that this world is really the world I’m to live in for the rest of time, maybe longer, then I must realize that all these crazy people are my new forever-neighbors, in my new forever-neighborhood. Trenton, she called it. My new forever-home.

  The place I now live. Forever.

  I don’t remember entering the little house I was told is mine, but I’m relieved to find it in better condition on the inside than it appeared on the out. The front den opens to a small kitchen area that I’ll supposedly never use. Why it’s there, I’ll never know. A cockroach scuttles across the floor, disappears into a crack in the wall. That must be my roommate, a fellow survivor of the end of the world. Further in, a short hallway opens into a quaint bathroom on one side and a bedroom on the other. And there you have it. In less than thirty seconds, I’ve given myself a tour of the place I’ll spend the rest of forever.

  Welcome to your new, roomier coffin. Comes with a kitchen.

  I suppose that’s what inspires me to run. From the house I bolt, not knowing where I’m headed. This dress I was put in, it snags on the door as I flee, the sleeve torn straight off. This hair of mine that was cured from the earth, white as winter, it bustles behind me like a cape. My reconstructed legs thrust forward, to where, who cares. From the house I would live in forever, the town I would live in forever. From this strange new life, from my Icecap eyes, my death I can’t remember, my beautiful life, I just run, run, run.

  I run until there’s no town around me anymore, until there’s no person or soul or breath in sight, until even the dead trees have fallen scarce, and before me only a cliff’s edge grows closer.

  That’s when I stop running.

  At the edge of the cliff.

  I peer down into the misty valley below which looks nothing like a valley at all. It’s as though this place, the deadwood forest, the town, as though it were aloft in the clouds somewhere. The mist down below, perhaps that’s the planet from which I’d died.

  YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

  I’m going to jump. That sounds like a brilliant idea. I lean over the precipice. All I see is a world of mist below, a world below the mist where maybe I lived a life.

  The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

  I’m going to do this. I close my eyes.

  “It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

  I spin, startled by the voice, but my foot has already slipped and I fall—then catch the edge of the cliff with my hands, clinging on for life, hanging on for death.

  The person emerges over the brink of the cliff. His pale face peers down at me as I hang from the edge, my legs dangling, far below me the mists of unknown, far below me where my second death waits patiently.

  “Can I help you?” he offers kindly.

  His face is handsome and gentle. Of course I’d notice something like that at a time like this.

  “I don’t want to be helped,” I cry out, breathless.

  “Then why are you hanging on at all? Let go.”

  He’s my age—I assume—with short black hair cutting partway down his forehead. I must’ve had the fashion eye when I was alive, or else the Refinery girls already rubbed off on me, because I notice he’s garbed in a fitted black button-down and slim jeans, clean, well-dressed and sleek. He smiles when our eyes meet, lighting up his whole tortured, dark demeanor. I even see blush in his cheeks, as though blood actually flows through his veins, just as it totally doesn’t in mine, such a liar even a cheek can be.

  “This is the first day of my life,” I explain.

  “Careful,” he warns me very seriously. “It’s a crime here to count days.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask, then realize at the sight of his chuckling eyes that he’s teasing me. Or maybe not, I can’t tell. Dead people aren’t the easiest to read. “What’s it matter, anyway? What’s the point of all this …?”

  “Many people have come to this cliff,” he admits, looking off into the mist, pensive. “M
any have also, like you, considered throwing away this opportunity.”

  “Opportunity??” I blurt out, while simultaneously marveling at how light my body is … how easy it is to just hang here from this precipice, just as easily as I could let go. Is strength another quality that accompanies this new body? Or is it that I now weigh less than a person?

  What does that say?

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he says. “Let me help you up and I’ll give you a kiss.”

  “That’s your offer?”

  “Yes.”

  I fully realize I can pull myself up. Somehow, hanging effortlessly as I am, I know I can do it without his help.

  Or his kiss. “You need to offer more than that,” I tell him, my eyes narrowing. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of this. Why am I here? Wasn’t I—Wasn’t I peaceful enough, happy enough being left dead and in the ground where I belong?”

  “You tell me,” he says teasingly, that snarky smile curling his cheeks into dimples again.

  I hate that cute, snarky smile. “What will happen if I let go? Will I die? Can the dead die again?”

  “No,” he admits with a hint of sadness in his voice. “If you must know, you’ll likely have a hard landing on the rock lands below, and your body will break into pieces. Shatter. Like a statue. Or a mannequin. A very pretty mannequin,” he adds. I look away, annoyed. “And you will remain alive, mostly in your head. The rest of you won’t be animated anymore, as I understand it.”

  I regret asking. I sorely, sorely regret asking.

  “Or you could let me help you,” he goes on, “and I could show you the town. Show you what you have in your Final Life. If still you’re not convinced, feel free to jump into the sky.” And he extends his hand.

  Helena’s last words resonate with me, that I was a “task” for her, and someday I may be chosen to Raise my own poor soul into this world. Not to mention that some unassuming moment, I may recover all my lost memory at once. Snap, it’ll all come back, shocking me like an “unwelcome enemy” ... and I wonder if the anger and unhappiness I’m harboring is just my Old Life locked away in my skeleton somewhere—a prisoner. Maybe it’s something that, if I remembered it, I would be glad I was freed from. Maybe this new life is something I’d secretly begged for, wished for. Maybe I really am ungrateful.

  Or maybe I’ll never remember the person I was.

  Maybe she’s gone forever.

  “Okay,” I agree emptily, taking his hand.

  In one short little effort, I’m standing on the edge of the cliff again, no longer hanging on for dear death. I look into the eyes of the person who saved me from a certain shattering—or postponed a certain shattering.

  “You look better on your feet,” he tells me.

  He doesn’t kiss me. I don’t ask his name and he doesn’t ask mine, not now. We just cross the sandy plains together and on through a range of dead trees, making our way back to my new hometown Trenton.

  I’m not sure what to talk about. What do you say to the person who just saved you from kinda-not-really dying? “Is it always so overcast?” I ask, deciding to point out the eerie silver wash that is the sky.

  “Has to do with our eyes,” he explains, stepping over a tree branch. “Undead don’t regard darkness the same way the Living do. Something about being stuck in the End of Time, I guess. But hey, listen, if you squint real good, you can make out a sharp spot in the sky, slightly more silver than the rest ... That’s the sun.”

  “Oh.” I look up. All I see is grey and grey and grey.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re keeping track of days.” He smiles again, warm, welcoming. “I’m not the police or the Deathless King, so help me.”

  “We have police in this world?—and a King?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “How are we alive?” I can’t stop the questions … They just pour out. “How are we carrying on without heartbeats or blood or—or anything?”

  “How did we carry on with them?”

  I sigh. “Please, is there a single concrete thing you can tell me about this world? Something useful? Anything?”

  “Yes. My name’s Grimsky.”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m Winter, I guess.”

  His expression breaks at the obvious dejection in my voice. “Winter … The name they gave you. I understand. Someday you’ll remember your original name, though by then I’m certain you’ll not identify with it in the least. You have beautiful hair.”

  The compliment comes so suddenly, I have to cover my face with a hand, like I’m blushing. Reminding myself that nothing runs in my veins, I drop the hand and say, “Thanks.”

  “We’ve arrived.”

  The tall iron gates of Trenton loom ahead, awaiting my timely arrival from the cliff for which it surely knew I’d be headed, at which it surely knew I’d meet this fetching person called Grimsky, by whom it surely knew I would be somewhat saved, and with whom it surely knew I’d once again return.

  Now if only I can keep from killing myself again.

  C H A P T E R – T W O

  D E A D

  I guess like most things in this new world, including eye color and flesh complexion and whether or not you’re dead, you just have to fake it.

  I can’t tell time here. Silvery grey-o’clock, that’s what time it is. Bleak, that’s the day of the week.

  My fellow roommate cockroach scuttles up the wall. With a disgusted shudder, I decide it’s time to get out of the house for the first time since my return to Trenton. The porch shudders too, so unused to carrying weight I suppose. Each step down them, a yawning of dead wood.

  Walking the dirt-lined street to the heart of the city, I allow myself a smile. I’m determined to like this new life, whether I like it or not.

  Maybe someone at the bazaar carries roach spray.

  The Town Square turns out to be a decent walk from my neighborhood. A stage sits in the middle of the plaza surrounded by boarded-up storefronts that all look closed but aren’t. Men and women bustle about with their days, shopping, conversing. A kid barters with a bothered old man over the worth of an antique from the twenty-first century.

  At the next city block, I encounter a long and narrow schoolyard full of kids. Class must be dismissed because the teenagers are gathered in little clusters outside. I’m struck for a moment by how … normal everything seems. As I watch the teens chat and laugh with each other, zipping up backpacks, sharing notes and gossiping, I forget for a while where I am. It’s nice, being captured by something so simple, so uncomplicated. I forget that I’m dead. I forget that all these kids are dead too.

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  A plump, short teenage girl with spiky brown hair and an eyepatch stands before me, a pink backpack hanging from her shoulder and a thick scarf coiled about her neck.

  “I’m new here,” I explain.

  “You seem a bit old to attend school.”

  “I meant to Trenton. I’m not … I’m not in school.”

  She studies my face for a second. “I’m seventeen, but I’ve been attending this school for a decade. If I were alive, I’d probably be married and knocked up in my thirties by now.”

  I blink, dazed by her bluntness. I have to remind myself that in this world, even age is a lie. And to think, I was just enjoying how normal everything felt. I didn’t realize how fleeting that moment would be, else I might’ve appreciated it a tad more.

  “My name’s Winter.”

  “Mine’s Summer. Just kidding, it’s Ann.” She smiles, her teeth sparkling with the shimmer of braces. I try to smile back, it probably falls flat. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to fake nothing around me. I wasn’t thrilled when I woke up in this place a decade ago either.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “This place isn’t all that bad. Look at it like a long holiday weekend … There’s no work, and Monday is forever, forever, forever away. The only thing you come to miss is the sun.” She hol
ds a hand up, peers into the sky. “I hope your favorite color is grey.”

  Quietly, I ask, “Why can’t we see the sun?” For some reason or another, I’m embarrassed to ask the question. I feel like a child asking her mother about the world. Why’s the sky blue. How are babies made.

  “Science wasn’t my thing when I was alive, neither now that I’m dead.” She shrugs, her backpack making jangling noises. “Undead, whatever. Hey, look on the bright side. You’ll never get sick or age. You don’t gotta eat anymore either.”

  “But I liked eating … I think.”

  She squints at me. “You want in on something fun?”

  “Fun?”

  “Follow me.”

  Assuming there wasn’t anything I planned to do with my day anyway—if I can bother telling where it ends or begins—I follow her across the street and down an alley. After a few turns (and passing several shady-looking faces) we arrive at the back of a building where several other teenagers are gathered. They’re arranged in a big circle and appear to be kicking an oddly-shaped soccer ball back and forth among them.

  “Sporty,” I remark. “Are we supposed to join in?”

  “Not on your first time,” Ann whispers back.

  One of the teenagers, a chubby boy wearing a thick striped scarf of his own, glances back at us. “She cool?” he grunts at Ann, who just shrugs. “Alright.”

  It isn’t until I’m closer that I realize the ball isn’t a ball.

  “What the hell?” I blurt. “That’s someone’s—”

  “Isn’t it genius?” Ann leans into me. “Just because we’re dead doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. Hey, but if you want to be part of the Heads, you can’t tell anyone about what you see here. It’s, well … more or less breaking every Trenton law.”

  “We have laws?”

  The soccer ball—I mean, the head—calls out “I’m done! I’m done!” and one of the teens kicks the head into the air, catches it, then helps return it to the person to whom it belonged—a girl I hadn’t noticed who was standing there without a head the whole time. Two kids holding the body up, another friend helps snap her back together. I see she’s a sweet thing with freckles and two blonde ponytails. Yes, that really did just happen. I’m watching this happen.