Sleeping Under Earth

Withered Carnation

I'm sixteen years old, and I'm dead.

I don't know my name, but I know I'm dead because everyone around me is dead. The last thing I remember before dying is hitting my head against a stump and knocking myself into a stupor. I'm roused from it by the violin-singing of locusts and by the smell that lodges like chips of wood in the back of my throat. The woman beside me has been here awhile, judging from the funeral shroud of downy cobwebs covering her face. Her skin gives like softened fruit at the pressure of my head on her shoulder. The others, the one my right leg in its snowboot is slung over, are firmer. Their faces still hold shape, although I don't recognize any of them. I'm one more corpse in this stack swept up like dried leaves. The newest occupant of a mass grave. I don't know how I still feel the bark in my hair from the tree that impacted my head, but I do. I also feel tiny bits of stone in my cheek, which is pressed into a slab of river rock stacked behind me, alternating gray and brown, arranged in the shape of a mini-shrine.

A shrine with a severed head sitting atop it, one even older than the woman beside me.

I push away with a strangled choke that strikes me immediately as undignified. It's almost "eww," and "eww" is what you say when you see an almost-mature bird's egg fallen on the ground and shattered. It doesn't seem appropriate for waking up next to a near-skeleton and a severed head.

Something thumps and my heart turns to ice inside me. The frost extends tendrils outwards. Oh. That is why. My sweater has been torn almost in half, right down the front, and a huge chunk of the cloth is gone. How sad. I liked that sweater. Grandma knitted it for me last Christmas, an alternating pattern of trees and stars in sparkly blue yarn. I'll have to be buried in something else. I probably would've been anyway, though. I'm also drenched in mud. Or does that mean I was already buried? How did I get back above ground? The thuds come closer and they shake the dirt below, or at least that's what it feels like. Numbed by the cold, I let my head fall back onto the shoulder of my neighbor and I close my eyes to slits.

Now, I hear breathing, almost loud enough to drown out the sound of the insects outside. Because it's dark, and I can't open my eyes all the way, all I see is a silhouette like the cutouts I used to make for school, in construction paper. It pulses with each breath it takes. It's waiting for me to do something, for a telltale throb in my veins, flutter of my eyelashes, air escaping from my own lips. It'll be waiting awhile, then, because I'm dead. This has never been a frightening thought, but now it's a relief. I close my eyes completely and block out everything but the rhythmic heaving.

I drift somewhere else, lulled. Before I hit my head so hard, I stood in a small kitchen, between a compact stove and a table, and I yelled. I see myself like a ghost does, from the outside, the flush in my pale cheeks, the spherical glint in my coal-colored eyes, the flexing of my fist. That girl doesn't feel like me. There's so much pumping through her heart, her veins; such heat around her. I have none of that. I am scraped out inside, like a discarded orange peel. I have no voice. There is nothing in my throat but the dry smell of decomposition and silence.

Silence. The breathing is gone. I risk opening my eyes again and the silhouette is no longer in the doorframe. Also, there is a slight presence: a pain in my neck where it's been stretched almost to my shoulder and an ache under the hair with the bark tangled in it. The skin exposed by the hole in my sweater has stopped feeling numb and has begun to sting. It's blue, and not just from the bruising and fingernail scratches. I grab the fraying torn yarn- there's nothing of clenched fists left in those hands, either- and tie it in a knot, like my summer midriffs. I pull my head from the girl's shoulder and lay it back on the stone. That makes me comfortable again. Comfortable as I was even earlier than the kitchen, when I could taste.

He says it's tortilla, the thick red and green soup in the oversized coffee mug. He holds it to my lips with one hand and, with the other, ruffles my hair. Never one for dinner-and-a-movie dates, he cooks it over an open bonfire at the highest point in town, the one stargazers use to set up their telescopes when the sky is clear. It's not cloudy tonight, just hazy, with a film over the stars and a ring around the moon. It's just crisp enough that the warm, chunky soup, heavy with the smell and taste of garlic and cilantro, is the perfect flavor. The ceramic of the mug is hot, too, and burns my lips. We sip wine with it, although we aren't supposed to, and its sour taste compliments it, just like the scent of his aftershave.

It hurts when another sound from the next room, something big hitting the floor, snaps me out of this reverie, reminding me these things and the boy who gave them to me are for the living, not whatever I've become now.

Yet my stomach churns, and the rock first soft as satin is beginning to grate like sandpaper. I have to shift again, lean forward, away from it. As soon as I do, my stomach pitches and I fall on my hands and knees. I keep my mouth closed tightly for fear I'll throw up. There's a voice in the back of my head telling me, stay dead, don't let anyone here know otherwise. Besides, I don't think the soup would taste as good the second time around.

I stand silently. I tug the wrist of the woman next to me. Her skin is like putty in my fingers so I lay her hand carefully in her lap instead. Please don't leave me, I beg silently; I don't want to be alone!

Oh, but you are not alone.

I turn to the severed head as if it had actually spoken. I know it's true. After the soup on the hill under the hazy sky, after the screaming in the kitchen... but before I hit my head...

The paper-man cutout fills in and I clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming, or worse, "eww-ing," which would be too humiliating a way to be caught. I remember who brought me here, who brought all of us here. And he is in the next room.

I pull my snowboots from my feet (I don't need them anymore because I'm dead), and in my stockings, I creep to the door. I don't need to open it. He left it cracked enough for me to squeeze through when he came to check on me, make sure I was still where he put me. I'm not, now, and I'm suddenly afraid this is going to get me in trouble. I suddenly feel like I'm shoplifting from the gas station and the attendant has grabbed my wrist, like I grabbed the wrist of the dead girl, to pull my thieving hands out of my pockets. Only it'll be worse than a courtesy trip to the police station if my current host catches me skulking in the doorway.

Where is he?

It's the noise I heard earlier that helps me find him. What I heard hitting the floor, it was a chair, a cobbled-together chair made from bits of other things. He slammed it beside the window and now he's sitting in it. There's no glass in that window, so the locusts, the rain-soaked air, the light pass through uninhibited. At first, I feel like I could escape that way, right by him, or right through him; why not? I'm incorporeal as the moonlight. However, I then notice the way that light paints a matte black shadow surrounded by halo. No different than he'd been in the doorway. Could it be he, too, is dead? Could he see a fellow spirit like me? I'd better not risk it. I watch where my feet go carefully. I do not cry out, not even when one of the splintered boards lining the floor rams a chunk of wood into my heel. I don't need to cry. I don't feel pain.

A warped creak tears through the air.

He jerks like a scarecrow come to life, away from the window. Sweat breaks on my forehead. I stumble backwards, searching frantically. I must be giving myself away, the energy of my suddenly racing blood so loud in my ears; surely he can hear it, too.

There is a closet behind me, a sloppy construction of old, discarded wood and pulp hammered into a Frankenstein's monster, just like the chair. I open it. I crawl inside. I pull the door after me, not completely closed, to avoid a telltale click. It is closed enough that the darkness, thick as the soup I drank earlier this evening, hides me. It is so narrow I feel the boards touching my shoulders.

I've closed myself in a coffin.

He paces outside, from one window to the next. I feel myself shiver, so much I'm sure my coffin must be shaking with me. Why haven't I been buried? I should be sleeping under the earth, in peace, not waking to this living nightmare. The one where neither does any good, the yelling, the kicking, the screaming; the quiet and the cold; nothing I do or don't do will make him go away...

The sound that spurred us both into motion is not inside the house, though. He has found its source, somewhere outside, and that is where he is going. I can see his overalls wrinkle as he kicks open his own door. He is not hunting me, after all. He has found something live to chase. He has left the door open again, too.

Crawling from my coffin, I walk through it. I listen. I want to know where he has gone, of course; but also if I can warn whoever or whatever he's after now. I hear nothing near the cabin, nothing but locusts, so I walk further. I listen hard, straining with each step, but I don't even hear my own feet touch the ground, though I certainly feel my socks soak up grime and ice water from the puddles. An owl startles me by hooting and lighting from a tree branch. Then there is nothing but bugs again.

The trees clear and I recognize where I am. By moonlight, I've found my way home.

As I've heard the dead often do.