Can’t Keep A Dead Man Down
Dark.
Dark and hot and crowded and oh my god I want to move but I can’t, stuck inside this dream I’m not awake and not asleep. I know exactly where I am and it’s a warm, sticky place where I’m thinking about writing so my hand is twitching like there’s a pen in it but my eyes won’t open and it’s dark and I keep squirming and thinking I’m going to wake up wake up wake up –
I’m up. Awake. I think.
Voices. Muffled, strained. Sounds I know but they’re both distant and near, the way I was both asleep and awake. Coming through layers of cotton, of wool, of – something moist. Heavy and moist.
Hell if I know what they’re saying.
Deja-vu like I never felt before. This wave just came over me, been here, done this, leave a good looking corpse ha ha. Better than vuja-de, like George Carlin would’ve said, that feeling that none of this has ever happened before. Ha. Ha.
Laugh riot, that’s me, just woke up and I’m cracking the old ones. Cracking bones.
Ugh, but it’s a bad morning, something’s sitting on top of me and it’s so goddamned dark in this room, as if my eyes are open but they’re not ’cause there’s many comforters on top of me. That’d be par for the course, that’s Sheila all the way for you, one degree below 60 and she’s got hypothermia, grew up in Florida and no tolerance, so it’s like sleeping next to a mummy with all her blankets and heating pads and body pillows.
Wrapped up so tight when we want to screw I gotta unpeel her like a banana to get to the meat, if you know what I mean.
I think you know what I mean.
But Christ it’s dark in here, I know it’s daytime but I can’t see a damned thing and I blink once, twice, three times just to make sure my eyes are opening and closing and they are but – let’s just peel some of these stupid blankets back.
What the hell is that? My hand comes away with some of that moist heaviness, crumbling away in my fingers and first thing I think is kitty litter. Sheila came with two cats when we shacked up a year ago but Oliver up and disappeared during the riots and she swears she hears him mewling in the backyard still and leaves out a tray of food and kitty litter for him and every day when the food’s gone and the litter is scattered all over the grass like snow she insists Oliver does come back but I’m pretty goddamned positive we won’t see his black-and-white face again.
In fact, I know it.
Lots of shit goes missing and it doesn’t come back, happens all the time, happens a lot more these days.
‘Course, being alive’s taken a bit of a spin lately. Used to be that doc put that icy-hot stethoscope on your chest and burned a light in your eyes and pronounced you healthy and living and ready to go out and pay some more bills. But after the riots – well, probably before but mostly during and definitely after the riots – we all learned how breathing and dilation wasn’t necessarily all there was to living.
This is definitely not kitty litter.
Getting hot in here again. In here. Am I inside something? Am I not sitting on top of my bed with Sheila’s suffocating covers holding me down? Answer, stupid: Probably not. If shit is crumbling in your fingers when you reach up to move away a blanket, well, that’s some serious cognitive dissonance going on.
A little more force is what’s needed here. Reach up, press once, reach up with other hand, press twice and –
Oh, god.
Whatever’s above me is heavy as shit and it’s cold and moist and I can’t – I can’t – it’s pressing down and it’s over there on my right and it’s over there on my left and I’m sitting on it and it’s like I’m inside a big rectangle and when I grab at it it comes away in my hands like sand like shit like –
A big chunk tumbles into my mouth mid-gasp and I spit, I hock, I expel but there’s plenty of time to taste and the tasting tells me everything, it’s earthy and rotten strewn with hard bits and I think of that cookie recipe my sister in law made up once but this tastes nothing like sweet chocolate sandwich cookies though they’re called the same thing –
Dirt. Holy shit I’m surrounded by dirt. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Not Sheila, that woman lost her sense of humor when the cat vanished. She actually thought I had something to do with it, you know. She saw me scoop up the cat when the riots began and I put him in a nearby trash can – for safety, for Chrissakes, so he wouldn’t get skewered by some of those lunatics’ pitchforks – and when we went to go back and get him the can was upended and, well, no Oliver.
I’m thisclose to losing my shit. I’m not sure why I haven’t lost it yet, it’s like my brain knows I’m in deep, deep shit –
Or a deep hole –
Ha?
Brains.
But the rest of me is all cool and rational and shit. It’s like I’ve dialed the panic station but they haven’t picked up the phone yet so there’s nothing to do yet. For a moment I go completely still and listen.
The voices. Now I know why they’re muffled. I hear people, I hear someone – someone beyond – and I suddenly am positive they know I’m here and they’re not even trying to help me out of this dank, dark, dirty place. In the midst of all of the quiet I can almost make one out, a high, anxious tone, one from a woman who loves cats and hogs all of the covers. The other – and there is another – is –
Carl. Neighbor. House to the right.
He’s the first one who came over after the riots died down and the fires were mostly under control, but even though he only had to go two feet from his front door to ours he brought a shotgun. You did better these days if you had some kind of firepower; I’ve a .45 in a shoebox Sheila doesn’t know about in the upstairs closet but that night Carl was the first one I saw carrying a gun openly like that. I mean, we’re in Baltimore and there are plenty of streets where folks keep a weapon hidden under a baggy T-shirt but not in this part of town. We’re the cute, trendy neighborhood. We’re not into all that shit.
Or, maybe, we just keep our shit better hidden, like my gun in the shoebox.
So yeah, probably Carl. He came over with his shotgun and we sat in the dark living room – not nearly as dark as this place I’m in now – on the floor while the sirens made a symphony in the distance and moans played a melody through the streets for hours and blasts popped on and off all night like it was the 4th of July. We talked about how the world has gone to hell and then we just sat there and waited, but nothing came and then Sheila remembered that Oliver was still in the can and we went out to the can and it was too late, he was gone.
When was that, anyway? Yesterday? Last week? I can’t remember.
Hungry. It happens, every time I wake up, I get up, I do two things: Take a leak, then hunt for cereal. And I’ve been up for … how long, now?
Was I even asleep?
It’s like watching a wave build in the distance, one you know would be incredible to surf but here you are standing on dry land watching it approach, thinking how lovely the day is – and then it turns into a tsunami and you can’t run away fast enough. That’s what the freak-out feels like and when it crashes over me I have no control, if I could see I’d see red and then it all goes bone white and I’m reaching up and clawing at the dirt, peeling away huge clods and pushing them to the side, it’s all pretty solid packed around me but above is soft and malleable and I can grab the pieces and if I only had someplace to put them I could make headway and I’m so goddamned hungry –
Not bad.
So I eat the dirt and swallow it rocks and grass and earthworms whole and it goes down not too horrible, I just grab and squish and push and gag it down and suddenly there’s all the room in the world ’cause I’m not getting full and I gotta get out from under whatever’s on top of me.
Nothing is more important than getting at those goddamned voices.
Carl and Sheila, you are both due for a great big shutting up.
In fact, before I do get to Sheila and bash open that pretty little head to reveal those squishy, squirming brains –
Brains.
— I might just tell her that I did, in fact, see Oliver one last time. He stumbled into the backyard a couple days after the fires were mostly out but the city still smelled like burning tires, putting one dirty gray paw in front of the other in an unsteady, wobbly way like he was drunk. His eyes were yellow, I remember that and that seemed funky because Oliver’s had always been blue.
I laughed for a minute, coming into the backyard for a quick smoke, seeing this drunk kitty I thought it’d be funny to video it for the Internet, but the Internet was gone like the electricity and I got all emotional and the cigarette dropped out of my fingers.
So I never did like that cat but I reached over to scoop him up, tell him it’d be okay, we had food inside the house and suddenly it was like there was a fire in my neck, he’d sunk his teeth into me and missed the jugular but it was enough to hurt like a son of a bitch and I flung him off me like a dirty shirt and he took away a chunk of my shoulder with him.
Blood, there was a fair amount of blood and that was definitely not a good thing.
Especially these days.
I grabbed the first thing I could get a hold of, a big heavy shovel we used last spring to make a garden that never took and I slammed it down on the animal’s head once, twice, three times and he was still hissing – god, what a miserable sound he was hissing the whole time and it was like he wouldn’t die –
And then he was quiet.
I lifted the shovel to reveal the bloody mass of cat that remained, and realized the edge had severed his pulped head from his body and I turned and vomited into Sheila’s outdoor kitty litter box. I vomited until it was just dry heaves and then I got a whiff of charred city and my spew and bloody cat and I think I about fainted.
Didn’t, though. Got rid of the cat instead. Tossed him in back that trash barrel he escaped from and burnt him up. Crispy. Nobody noticed the smell, not when it matched the perfume Baltimore had had for a week or two by then.
Then I buried him.
Cleaned myself up.
Went to bed.
Woke up here. In the dark.
For a second I have this crazy notion, even as I’m chowing down on my latest handful of dirt clod – yes, even more insane than eating dirt – and I think, Holy crap, am I the cat?
Do I have nine lives?
A tiny fistful of dirt dissolves into my face and there it is – light.
Not a lot of it, more the absence of darkness, but – a brighter gray, a whiff of burning and tires and Baltimore. I push a triumphant fist through the opening and flex my fingers – I’m almost out of here.
And the voices.
They’re clear now.
Sheila, a high-pitched wail of anguish.
And Carl, gagging, terrified. “Jesus Christ!” I hear him say.
I giggle, thrusting my head through the hole, dirt crumbs dribbling out the corners of my mouth. Not quite, I think.
Sheila, mid-wail: “Why won’t he stay down, Carl? Why won’t he just stay down?”
Can’t keep a dead man down, I think, and then I am reborn.
END.
by Randee Dawn
Bio:
Her short fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine and Fantasia Divinity; this story, “Can’t Keep a Dead Man Down” was originally podcast on Well-Told Tales. Find out more amusing and potentially creepy things about her online at: randeedawn.com and @randeedawn on Twitter, or sign up for her newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/cfh8sf