by Curran, Tim
“But you weren’t dead, baby!” Mother said again and again. “I told them at the wake and I told them at the funeral and they wouldn’t believe me! They wouldn’t believe that my little girl wasn’t dead! But I knew! I knew! I knew you weren’t dead!”
“Yes, I was, Mother,” Emily said.
But Mother didn’t hear that either.
There were only her delusions now which were a high, sturdy brick wall that things like reason and decency could not hope to break through. She had her Emily back and that’s all that mattered, that’s really all that mattered. Emily was back…or something that looked like her was.
“Help me, baby,” Mother said, on her hands and knees, pushing wet earth back into the grave. “We have to cover this up so people don’t ask questions. You know how they ask questions. But I won’t let them take you away from me again.”
But Emily did not help.
She just stood there, still grinning, watching Mother fill in the grave, watching her cry and sob and make funny, high-pitched sounds deep in her throat. Emily did not honestly see the point of filling in the grave. She had not been among the walking dead long enough to understand that there was a need to be careful, a need for secrecy in all things relating to her rising.
But that would come with experience.
As all things did.
Emily’s memory was intact and she was sly and cunning. She would learn. For essentially she was still a child and had a child’s love of play and make-believe. So she figured it wouldn’t be too hard to pretend she was a harmless little girl.
As Mother labored, Emily looked around the cemetery, at the crypts and monuments and stones, enjoying this place and thinking she would like to come here often. But not too often. If she did that, sooner or later she would be seen and that would give the game up. People expected dead little girls to stay in their coffins, they did not like them wandering around cemeteries by night.
Even Emily knew that.
Mother finished the grave, filthy from head to foot, only her eyes and teeth white and shining like an old time vaudeville performer in blackface. It all added to the necessary absurdity of the entire situation. She came right over to Emily and hugged her, wrinkled her nose at the smell, but kept hugging all the same. A fat, twisting earthworm fell from Emily’s matted hair and Mother cried out. But even this, she ultimately ignored.
“Let’s go home, baby,” she said. “Let’s get you out of this awful place.”
Emily allowed herself to be led away by the hand amongst the leaning stones and vaults covered in creepers. She did not want to leave. She wanted to run through this place and sing and dance, hide behind stones and leap out in the cold moonlight. The smell of rank earth and rotting boxes, crumbling flesh and yellowed bones intrigued her, made her stomach growl. She wanted to dig down far below with her bare hands and chew on things. Nibble them.
But Mother would not have that.
They went through the gates and a church bell in the distance gonged out the hour of midnight. It was a perfect time for a resurrection and Emily knew it. And knowing it, she giggled. Then they were in the car and Emily remembered that she hadn’t been in the car since the night her appendix burst and the infection set in. She couldn’t remember much of that, just the fever and the pain and the sound of Mother crying at her bedside.
“Everything’s going to be okay now, baby,” Mother said. “You’ll see. Mother will make everything right.”
Emily just kept grinning, feeling the hollow in her belly and wanting to get her teeth in some meat. She thought of crunching bones and chewing graying meat and the image of these things made her stomach growl. If it wasn’t for the heat in the car that Mother insisted on blasting, things would have been perfect. Emily sat there as they drove into town, remembering things from before but associating no warmth with any of it.
She knew only hunger.
“Talk to Mother, baby, please talk to me.”
So Emily did. “I’m hungry,” she said.
*
At home, Mother told her they had to be quiet. Very quiet because George was sleeping upstairs and they didn’t want to wake him. Not yet. Not before Mother had time to explain certain things. But Emily understood. When you came out of the grave, certain things had to be explained. She remembered George just fine. George was her step-father, Mother’s husband. Not Emily’s real dad because he was dead a long time. George had liked Emily when she was alive. He took her to the zoo and the circus, he took her shopping and bought her things and helped her with her homework. George had been very nice. But like everything else, there was no fondness associated with George now. Emily had liked him before and maybe she would even like him now…once he was cold.
“The first thing we have to do is clean you up,” Mother said.
Mother cleaned herself up first and made Emily wait in her old bedroom. Emily looked at the posters on the pink walls, the princess bed and frilly pillows, the books and CDs and dolls lined up on the shelf. It meant nothing to her. Just things that she had collected up and coveted once, but no longer. She did not see how they would get her meat so they had no practical value. The bed felt soft and spongy. Emily did not like it, nor the clean stink of detergents on the Beauty and the Beast coverlet.
What she did like was the mirror.
She could remember how she liked to put on dress-up clothes and look at herself in it. She looked at herself in it now. She looked…changed. She was very thin and her skin was very white, gray shadows under her eyes, her lips almost black. Still grinning, her teeth looked long and narrow and yellow, black stuff wedged between them. Her gums were gray and her lips were shriveled back from them.
Emily liked how she looked.
She liked the patch of fungus at her throat, the soil that clung to her white lace burial dress. The beetle that crawled over her brow and the larva squirming in her cheek. She especially liked her eyes which were large and black and never seemed to blink. They stared and stared, wide and cataleptic. She held up her hands and her fingers were bony, the skin gray and seamed, dirty and damp.
She had a smell to her that was all her own.
It was fetid.
And absolutely delicious.
Mother took her into the bathroom and scrubbed her under a hot spray of water. The heat was sweltering and it made Emily nearly sick to her stomach. Mother shampooed her hair and scrubbed her with pink soap, scrubbing and scrubbing, cleaning the grave dirt off her and the patches of green mildew that had grown up her cheeks and down her arms. Emily did not like being washed. The soap smelled of berries and lilacs and the shampoo smelled of coconut and she found it nauseating. She liked her other smell. The smell of wormy earth and embalming fluid, putrescence and casket satin.
But Mother would not have that either.
She dressed Emily in lavender pajamas, the ones with prancing cutesy unicorns on them. Emily remembered that she had loved unicorns before, but now things were different. She did not understand unicorns any more. She only understood burial. And meat.
In the kitchen, Emily’s other smell beginning to make itself known, seeping through the perfume of soaps and shampoos, Mother made her some food. First toast and Cocoa Pebbles. Then waffles and Ore-Ida French fries in the oven. But Emily did not want these things. She did not want pre-sweetened cereal or bread, pizza or Hostess pies. She wanted other things.
“You have to eat something,” Mother said. “You’re…you’re so thin.”
“I’m hungry,” Emily said.
So Mother went through the cupboards and refrigerator, trying to find something Emily might want. Emily was sickened by the smell of everything Mother made. But there was another odor, one that was intriguing. When Mother’s back was turned, Emily followed it to its source: the garbage can under the sink. In there, amongst egg shells and old lettuce leaves and discarded tissues there were a few scraps of raw hamburger clinging to a foam carton. They were discolored and rank-smelling. Emily began to lick them free, th
e juices in her mouth running at the wonderful taste, the wonderfully rotten smell.
“Emily!” Mother said, slapping the carton from her cold white hands. “You can’t eat that! It’s yucky! It’s full of germs!”
“I’m hungry,” Emily said.
And then she heard footsteps coming down the stairs and knew it was George. She could smell his cologne and it was disgusting. But there was a good, yummy odor there as well. Some reeking juice, perhaps, from thawing meat he had dripped on his sock. Just a speck, no doubt, but Emily could smell it and it made her mouth water.
Mother heard George’s approach, but too late to do much about it. Her eyes wide and frightened, she looked over at Emily. “Hide!” she whispered. “Get in the pantry.”
So Emily did.
George entered the kitchen. “Christ, Liz, where have you been? You had me worried sick.”
“There was some shopping to do,” Mother said.
“At this hour?”
Emily could sense Mother’s apprehension. She could smell the sweat that ran down the back of her neck, hear the steady tom-tom beat of her heart. “Some places are open twenty-four hours,” Mother said, thinking quickly.
Like cemeteries, Emily thought.
George grumbled a bit. “What’s that smell in here?” he asked. “Smells like something died.”
Emily giggled under her breath.
“It’s…it’s the garbage,” Mother said. “I was just going to take it out.”
Oh, Mother’s juices were running hot now, her nerves jangling with electricity. Her palms were sweaty and her lips quivering. George had her very upset. Emily thought it was funny. It was a game Mother was playing, a gag she was playing on George.
George did not seem to like it.
He stepped farther into the kitchen. Emily could see him from the darkness of the pantry, hidden there as she was amongst the shelves of canned goods and dried pasta, the bags of potatoes and onions that smelled very sharp, though not unpleasant.
“Are you all right, Liz? You don’t look so good. Do you feel all right? You know what the doctor said. You’ve been through an awful lot, you need your rest.”
“I’m fine,” Mother told him. “Why wouldn’t I be just fine?”
Emily grinned from her hiding place. Though the pantry was pungent with the odors of dried food and vegetables, she was smelling that drop of juice on George’s sock. It was intoxicating.
“Liz…c’mon, honey, let’s talk, okay? Tell me what’s on your mind. Is it Emily? Let’s talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Mother told him, her voice growing cross.
George went over to her. “Honey, please. She’s gone. We have to accept that, we have to get on with—”
“She’s not gone!” Mother said, her eyes filled with tears, her head shaking from side to side. “She’s not gone at all!”
“Liz…”
Mother was right and George was wrong, but he didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand any of it because it was part of the game. Emily decided it was time to teach him the game, so then he, too, would know. She stepped out of the pantry, her eyes huge and her pale mouth grinning. “Peekaboo!” she said.
George literally jumped and swung his head around. He looked and his eyes widened and his mouth opened and his head began to thrash violently back and forth. His ruddy complexion bleached to the color of new bone. In the split second that realization settled in, he began to breathe very fast, in and out, as if he could get no air. “Oh no, oh no, oh no! Oh, dear God, no! It can’t be! IT CANNOT FUCKING BE! IT CAN’T—”
He was scared and Emily knew it.
Just scared out of his mind, his heart racing and his lungs rasping, a sharp and foul odor of fear-sweat coming off him. Something Emily could smell just as a wild animal can. She did not know, though, if he was really afraid or just pretending like they did with their yearly Halloween games.
So she jumped out at him and hissed, baring her teeth and making her fingers into claws.
George screamed and fell into Mother who kept trying to explain it all, crying and choking, her voice wavering and completely mad. This is what they’d both wanted, wasn’t it? This is what they’d both needed…Emily back with them. And now she was. And wasn’t that wonderful? Wasn’t that an absolute miracle? WELL, WASN’T IT? These were the things Mother kept saying…or trying to…but George was not hearing her. He was only trying to get away as Mother held onto him, shouting louder and louder about what a miracle it all was. And then they were fighting. George was out of his mind and Mother was trying to hold him and he was hitting her, calling her names and she was crying and shaking and it was an ugly scene. “This isn’t normal! This isn’t natural! Look at that fucking thing! That’s not your daughter! That’s not Emily! It’s a thing from a fucking grave!”
They fell to the floor fighting and Emily did not like their fighting. George was going to be trouble. So Emily pulled a metal tenderizing mallet from the cupboard and brought it down on his head, loving the pulpy sound his skull made. She brought it down again and again and again, blood spattering against her face and standing out in sharp contrast against her white, seamed skin.
“No, Emily!” Mother cried out. “No, no, no! Stop that! Stop it!”
So Emily stopped and George’s body just lay there, very still and quiet. Emily stared down at it, liking him better this way. Now he wasn’t causing trouble. Now he was happy. Emily looked at the end of the mallet. There was blood dripping from it, brain globs, strands of hair. She brought it to her mouth and pressed her tongue against it. It tasted good, so she began licking the stuff off and spitting out the hairs. It was tasty…though much too warm to be truly delicious.
“Emily! Emily! Emily!” Mother cried, afraid again. Angry, maybe, and unhappy. “Don’t do that! Don’t do that! Do you hear me?”
Emily heard her. “But I like to,” she said.
That made something snap inside of Mother.
She pressed herself up against the refrigerator, sobbing and trembling and a funny look came over her. She began to talk to herself, staring but not blinking at all. Laughing sometimes so Emily knew things were all right. Mother was just going crazy again like she had when Emily had first come out of the grave. Poor Mother. If Emily had been capable of compassion, she might have felt sorry for her. Mother just sat there, that terrible look on her face like part of her mind, probably an important part, had been sucked down into some black, bottomless gulf.
“Watch me,” Emily told her and went on her knees next to George’s corpse.
George’s head was open and things were leaking out, clear things and red things and gray things and clumping things. Emily dipped her fingers into his open skull like it was a fondue pot, the kind they’d had at her seventh birthday party last year. She dipped her fingers and licked them off. Everything was tasty. Her hunger was so severe that finger-licking was not enough. She gripped George’s skull and broke it apart with her fingers, licking at the sweet red jelly inside, sucking up strands of tissue and the buttery soft folds of gray matter.
Mother just stared off into space, her mouth moving but no words coming out.
Emily cleaned out the skull until she was full. Inside, it was clean and sparkling and white like a freshly-washed pot. There was more good stuff, but Emily was full. For now.
Her bloodless face smeared with gore, Emily just stood over Mother, smiling at her.
Finally, Mother’s eyes began to focus. “Oh, Emily,” she said, her teeth chattering. “You can’t…you can’t eat the dead.”
“Yes, I can,” Emily told her. “I like the taste.”
*
Mother did not like to do what she did next, but she did it because she had to. She had to protect Emily and she would do whatever that took. She loved Emily so much and she kept telling her that. But it was lost on Emily, because whenever she thought of people like Mother, there was only coldness inside her, ice crystals and graveyard earth, nothing
more…except hunger.
“George did not understand, Emily,” Mother said as she dragged the body to the back door. “I wanted him to understand, but he wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t understand how wonderful this all is. And we’ll miss him, but we can’t have him causing trouble, now can we?”
Emily shook her head. Already she understood that she did not like people who caused trouble.
Mother took care of everything.
She dragged George’s body out into the backyard and dug a deep hole in the flower garden and then put him in it. It was a nice hole, Emily thought, there in the rich black soil beneath the spreading limbs of the old oak tree where Emily’s tree swing still hung. She wanted to lie down in there with George, be buried with him. All that dirt would be nice, but Mother said no.
