The Dead Never Die

by Bajaña, Edgar

  When Amy got to the park, she sat behind a man who didn't even bother to look at her. She sat down and crossed her legs.

  For a few moments, she took a look at the sky. Then, she took a tablet out of her oversized purse to flip through the virtual pages of the glowing screen. She was looking for an ebook about how to write an ebook.

  Many of her friends had written something. Maybe, she could write something too. Maybe she could get a novel completed during the summer, while she laid on the grass in Central Park.

  As she scanned several web pages, Amy found a couple of how/to-write ebooks online. There was one called, "30K in 30 Days." There was another one was called, "Publishing is a Button." Before she bought them, she thought about what inspired her to write. Maybe, it was her sister, Mary, who had a love for photography and it sometimes made her jealous. In the end, Amy wanted to love something as much as Mary did. And she hoped that writing was it.

  Or maybe she felt inspired by something else. Maybe it was the sweet and sad words she's been reading for the past couple of weeks. The material filled her nostalgia every time she read those passages. The words of the author took her to a place where she lost and found herself.

  She had just finished reading "The Double" and "Blindness" by Jose Saramargo. Every time, she read those books, something lingered in her heart. In a way, she wanted to write her own version of those stories. But, every time she tried, her words came out clunky and awkward. Worst of all, her words felt weightless and insubstantial.

  Many times she gave up. But, the feeling to write something of her very own always remained in her heart. There were too many times when she did not feel alive until she saw her words on the page.

  "Don't give up," Nick told her. "Don't stop and don't ever give up. All it takes is practice. That's all."

  "Practice? That'll take forever."

  "You're right. It probably will. But, perseverance and dedication is the only way to get there. Remember we all make it in our own way and no other."

  "How?" She asked him.

  "It takes time." Nick told her. "But eventually, you'll make it. You just have to focus on the things you love. Think about that thing that tugs at your soul and describe them in words. That's always the best place to start."

  "But...what if my stories don't make sense or suck."

  "No. No. No. You have to remember that we all take a vow to something or another. Remember, there are writers who write books. But there are also authors who build stuff. That's all they do. They build new worlds inside people's heads. You can do that too."

  With that thought, Amy was ready to purchase "Publishing is a Button" with a push of a button.

  But, she got side tracked. Her phone sent a text alert to her tablet.

  It was a news alert.

  In the middle of her purchase, the news alert filled the screen. When she read the headline, her eyes widened and she became startled by every word she read.

  Something happened in the Borough of Queens, where her sister lived. The tragedy she read about happened in Astoria, which seemed like a world away. Then, that distance seemed like nothing.

  At the time, Amy was living in Brooklyn in an overpriced two-bedroom apartment on Bedford Avenue. There was a time when she once wasted her life away on the circuit of hipsters, festivals and loft parties throughout Manhattan. But all that changed one day.

  And that day was today.

  "My god," she said, as she continued reading the article which was flashing on the screen. The story was about a mother doing the most awful thing to her children. It was just the worst thing that she ever heard of.

  "How terrible," she said. "How can someone be so horrible to their own children? really?"

  Then, she heard someone behind her repeat her words. She turned around and saw the back of a man's head. She noticed the thin handle of his brown glasses sitting on the lip of his ear.

  But, he didn't turn around to look at her.

  She was about to say something to the man. But she decided to just let it go. She turned around and faced forward, letting the breeze brush her hair. In the end, it was better to keep her thoughts to herself.

  Amy knew better.

  She knew that there were all types of crazy people out there in the street. There wasn't one day that went by when she didn't see some crazy person on the train talking to themselves.

  Sometimes, it was better to say quiet and stay in the background. The unspoken rule of the streets was basically to keep your distance and keep looking ahead, as if they did not exist.

  Amy knew that the city was full of dark places where things just went bad. But, Amy knew that the worst monsters were the smarter ones, the ones that hid in plain sight. They were the trickiest of them all.

  Those poor children, she thought.

  When Amy thought about how she felt, she realized that it was the first time she sensed any kind of maternal instinct for a child that wasn't even hers. And the feeling surprised her. For a long period of time, she didn't even want to have kids. Sure, they were cute, for a while. But eventually, even they grow into something unexpected. Eventually, even they turn on the hand that feeds them.

  It wasn't until she met Nick that her attitude about children changed. Now, she didn't mind having a child, just one, especially with Nick. It was him that showed her something different about life.

  Amy reeled back on the park bench, thinking about how this mad woman in Queens could not of felt anything for those children? The whole damn thing was a tragedy that no one could look away from.

  In the article, there were two pictures. The larger one showed the mother being taken away by the police. She was a black woman and as thin as a rail. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets and her kinky hair looked like a wet bush of cotton candy. In all, she looked like a mad woman, plain and simple.

  Last night at 3 pm in the morning, that mad woman drove a light blue Oldsmobile into the east river.

  There weren't many people around the park and the police found only one eyewitness.

  This man was running around Astoria park when the car plowed into the river. He was a jogger and had the day off of work.

  The papers described him as a pale faced man with brown rimmed glasses, wearing a bright red jogging suit.

  The jogger told police that the car sped through the street like a rocket and slammed through the guardrail and dove straight into the river. He told the police exactly what happened with a single swoosh of his hand.

  The jogger swore he saw a woman in the drivers seat, scared out of her mind. It was as if she came to her senses in mid air. She pounded on the glass, trying to break it. But she was trapped inside. They were all trapped inside.

  Everyone was worried about the mother. But there was another story happening in the truck of the car. There was the sound of screaming.

  However, the jogger swore he did not hear the sound of children screaming. He didn't think that it came from the car, at all. He swore he didn't.

  If he did, he would have jumped into the East River to do what he could. He would have tried to save them. But, he didn't believe that those kids were in the back. The thought of a woman driving her car into the river, with three kids in back, was just too horrible to be true. Even he could not believe that something like could happen in this world.

  "Those poor children..ah..." Said the jogger.

  "I can't even believe it," said the man sitting behind her. But, Amy didn't turn around. She just ignored him, like she did all the crazies in the city.

  But, the story was true.

  The mad woman had locked all three children inside the trunk of the car. At first, they were playing a game that the kids thought was at first a fun idea. When they were inside the trunk, she told them that were in a spaceship. After a while the truck became hot and stuffy. Before the children knew it, she drove them into the water, from where they never returned. She drowned her own children and they became the first victims of the night. The children had no ch
oice. There was only five feet between the car and the flowing river.

  Later, the police found out that the children weren't even hers. The mad woman had no children of her own. The three year boy wasn't hers. The other two children belonged to her neighbors. No one knew how she got her hands on those poor children.

  In the paper, there was another picture attached to the article. This time, it was a picture of a cop holding one of the dead children in a small plastic black bag. He was on a boat.

  All that Amy could think about was that black plastic bag. Inside, that bag there was once a boy with the fresh glow of youth.

  Now that was extinguished...gone.

  "Why? Amy asked. "What would make the mad woman do something like that? It can't be that she's just crazy. It can't."

  That afternoon, she re-read the article, trying to discover what she could, trying to apply some kind of logic to a situation that was plain madness.

  In the end, she heard the stranger sitting behind in the park. He leaned back his head and whispered to her something by her right ear.

  "Don't worry, my dear. Don't worry about any of it. It's all going to hell, anyways...I promise."

  Twenty-Four

  On Blades of Grass

  The sun was falling and Amy ran passed the black iron gates of the cemetery. At first she didn't know who or what she would find inside. She only hoped that she could get to her sister back home, before the night arrived.

  She hoped that nothing as dark as the thing that stirred in her imagination, existed.

  Her sister just got lost. She told herself. That was all.

  But, all the bad things that she thought about remained, like the last few drops at the bottom of a glass.

  Pass the gate, she ran into the city of the dead. On the driveway, she stopped and stood there panting. Air filled the space between her flesh and her coat. Her hair was sweaty and stuck to her face.

  There was no sun, only an overcast sky where everything was covered in a grey blue. In the cemetery, there was a mist rising from the ground. She caught her breath and walked up the path. Above the cemetery, she could see the Long Island Expressway filled with cars and trucks flying across the sky.

  "My poor sister." Amy said, as she looked over a field of graves. There was a chill in the air.

  She had been inside Calvary cemetery only two times before. The first time was when her mother died. And the second was when she went to see Joe. She knew where Joe was buried and went their to make sure he was dead. But, she never told Mary about any of it.

  After Joe died, Amy told herself that she wasn't going to spend any more time thinking about him. He was nothing to her.

  How quickly everything changes, in a world where anything that can happen, does.

  Amy caught her breath and looked down the mist covered road. There was someone there, not too far away from her.

  Huh. She said to herself. It was in that moment when she spotted a boy. Where is that boy's mother, she wondered.

  The mist rose from the ground of the cemetery and thinned out by the boy's feet, like a weak tide coming in. He stood still, like a statue. He stared into the cemetery as waves of twirling mist started to thicken.

  It wasn't long before the mist grew into a fog before her every eyes. She became fascinated by it, as much as the boy was. She wished that she had her notebook to take the moment for herself. It seemed like she stood before a wall of white nothingness.

  She didn't realize it, but she ended up joining the boy and looking at the white wall of the dead. For a moment, she forgot about her sister and didn't even think of her until she looked over at the boy.

  Amy's eyes widened, once she recognized who it was. "Oh my god," she said to herself. She grabbed the back of his neck and got the boy's attention.

  She saw the boy's eyes widened with fright, as he turned around to look at who it was. Then, she felt a wave of relief come over him. Amy bent down and spoke to the boy.

  "What are you doing here by yourself. Where's your mother? Where is she?"

  "I don't know. She's not listening to me. Aubbie," said the boy.

  "When was the last time you saw here? You have to tell me. We have to gt her."

  The boy pointed down the road where his mother disappeared. He saw her walk away where the other woman walked off. Into nothingness, they both left.

  "She went into the fog. Down there," said the boy.

  As Amy looked into the thick fog, she grabbed the boy's hand. She hesitated for a second. She felt as if her world was about to change again and she thought about her own child. She thought about her little boy, Noah, who was back home.

  Then, Amy turned around to look outside the gate of the cemetery. She saw heavy traffic flowing down Queens Boulevard in both directions.

  All she wanted to do was leave with the boy and come back with the police. That probably would have been the smartest think to do. That was a sensible plan.

  However, the boy took a couple more steps inside. He led Amy by the hand.

  "We have to go," said the boy. "We have to go find her, before the night comes."

  The boy was right, she couldn't leave her sister alone in this place, especially after dark. She too had heard about to many strange happening lately throughout these neighborhoods. So, there was no choice but to find her sister as fast as she could and get the hell out of there. For a final time, she looked at the traffic passing on the street. There was still time to just leave.

  Then, she stared at the sky and there was still a good twenty minutes of light left.

  This time, she grabbed the boy's hand. And together, they stepped into a wall of nothingness, where they disappeared.

  Twenty-Five

  Oh my farrow. Oh my love.

  Amy met Joe once before. However, Amy did not remember a single moment of it.

  Joe had this way of being forgettable. He met her a while back, when he used to wear his hair slicked back. In fact, it was Amy that led Joe to Mary.

  However, all memory of that time was gone. It was a gap, a void. If she remembered, she would have known one thing. That Joe treated all his women like dogs and nothing more.

  She knew exactly what he was and she still spoke to him. How could she be so stupid? In a way, she was no different from all the others.

  There was once a time when Amy lived in an old railroad apartment in Brooklyn with a roommate that she met on Craigslist.

  It was a time before Joe, the man with the pale white face and brown rimmed glasses, slid into her life. However, she would one day find out that he was always there and that he was not just after her blood. He was after so much more.

  He was more creative than that. For him, there were so many ways to destroy a life. The pale face man was the most mischievous thing that had ever walked the earth. He was the kind of guy that was ready to cause havoc at a moments notice. All he needed to do was pick up one of his tools that he kept close by.

  When Amy posted the ad online, she specified that she wanted a roommate who was a female. But, she wasn't picky. She just hoped to find someone decent and quick. She was sure to have her pick of a roommate because the neighborhood was a mecca for trendy Bohemians and creative types who were willing to overlook the conditions of the neighborhood. Sure. The train line was a little out of the way. But the rents were still rising.

  With a roommate to help her pay the bills, she was sure to stay in the eastern edge of Jamessburg and live her life the way she wanted.

  In a way, Amy wanted to keep living in her apartment because she aspired to be like the people she saw walking and galavanting down Beford Avenue. Someday, she thought. Someday, she would set herself free by the shear power of her own talent. But even that was superficial.

  While the ad was running on Craigslist, she met a man at the laundromat. They sat together as they waited for their laundry to dry. It didn't take long before they struck up a conversation. In that small time when they got to know each other.

  As he told h
er about back home in Chicago, she felt comfortable with him. She laughed at the things that he said and they had a good time. He was nice and funny and bit serious too. However, most of the time he was funny. He mentioned to her that he was looking for a place to stay.

  In a way, they were kindred spirits. He was like her, one of thousands of people moving around from apartment to apartment, like a game of musical chairs.

  "It's a god damn rat race out there," he told her. "Sometimes it's like trying to hold on to a spinning top that never stops spinning."

  When the dryer was done, she told him about the room that was available in her apartment and she asked him if he would be interested in being roommates.

  He didn't even hesitate a second. He said sure.

  He gave her the deposit for the room that very day. Once the check cleared, she breathed a sigh of relief and deleted the craigslist ad. But even she did not know what was in store for her. Eventually, her roommate became her boyfriend and later he became a womanizer.

  At the end of this round, she was left with the security deposit and a broken heart in her hand. It was this mistake that made her change.

  She looked at the words that she wrote down on the page and she realized something that her sister told her.

  In the beginning, Amy was the irresponsible one. She was the one running around like a chicken with her head cut off. As a result, she always got burned by the opposite sex. What happened to her on Craiglist was one event on a long series of events.

  In the past, her sister Mary was the stable one. Mary was the sister that Amy could rely on for basically anything. She was the sister that was always there to try to knock some sense into her.

  Not a week went by where Mary did not tell Amy that her problem was that she took so many things for granted and that she basically looked at everything superficially.

  "Love something." Mary told her.