The Living Dead 2

We. I so badly needed to be a part of “we” again. Does that make me codependent? My vision blurred by anguish, my mood black as pitch, I glared at this four-legged interloper. It grunted again and scraped a hoof against the pavement. The effrontery was too much. It was this goddamned filthy animal that was trespassing on this scene of human loss.

I disengaged from the girl’s cadaver-and that’s all it was now, just a plain old regular garden-variety corpse-and stood up, my fists vibrating with barely contained mayhem. I wanted to hurt this threadbare excuse for a deer, its antlers cracked and collapsing, its fur a mat of mud and grime and abrasions. I stepped toward it and it shook its head back and forth, its right antler threatening to drop off with each motion.

“I hate you miserable bastards,” I hissed. “I’ve always hated the deer on this godforsaken island, but now you, you really put it in italics. Can’t you see this is a private moment? I know it’s beyond your feeble peanut brain to show any goddamn respect, but so help me if you don’t get the hell away from here I’ll bash your skull in!”

It stood there, steaming away in the sleet.

So I took a swing at it. Not the brightest thing I’ve ever done, but I was a tad overwrought, shall we say? Open handed I made to slap it right across the muzzle and it bit me. And then it hit me why these deer looked so spectacularly putrid: they were dead. Undead. Whatever. They were animated corpses. Humans aren’t the only ones circling the drain. It’s all life. All of it.

So now I’m looking at the fresh white gauze wrapped around my right hand, a ring of small red dots seeping through. Not a lot of blood; in fact quite little. But enough to have me concerned.

And back on that road lies the undead girl of my dreams. I didn’t bury her.

I guess I’m infected.

The Wrong Grave by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is a short fiction specialist whose stories have been collected in three volumes: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Begi

This story is about a heartbroken young man who buries the only copies of some of his poems in the grave of a young woman he loves. The Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti did exactly the same thing in real life after his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who had modeled for many of his paintings, died from an overdose of laudanum. And as in this story, Rossetti later regretted his dramatic, romantic gesture and had his wife’s grave exhumed so that he could retrieve his poems, which were then published in 1870. The Pre-Raphaelites were dedicated to restoring to art the classical values of pose, color, and composition, which they felt had been denuded by the stuffy influence of art academies. (Rossetti’s sister Christina is also famous for her long poem Goblin Market, which has influenced generations of fantasy authors.) In later years Dante Rossetti became obsessed with exotic animals, especially wombats-he finally managed to acquire one, which he would have join him for supper. His parties were also enlivened by his pet toucan, which he would dress in a cowboy hat and then have ride his llama around the di

The protagonist in our next tale is not so fortunate. And if you thought the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was full of strangeness, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

All of this happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year. Miles pla

He’d tucked the poems, handwritten, tear-stained and with cross-outs, under Bethany’s hands. Her fingers had felt like candles, fat and waxy and pleasantly cool, until you remembered that they were fingers. And he couldn’t help noticing that there was something wrong about her breasts, they seemed larger. If Bethany had known that she was going to die, would she have gone all the way with him? One of his poems was about that, about how now they never would, how it was too late now. Carpe diem before you run out of diem.

Bethany’s eyes were closed, someone had done that, too, just like they’d arranged her hands, and even her smile looked composed, in the wrong sense of the word. Miles wasn’t sure how you made someone smile after they were dead. Bethany didn’t look much like she had when she’d been alive. That had been only a few days ago. Now she seemed smaller, and also, oddly, larger. It was the nearest Miles had ever been to a dead person, and he stood there, looking at Bethany, wishing two things: that he was dead, too, and also that it had seemed appropriate to bring along his notebook and a pen. He felt he should be taking notes. After all, this was the most significant thing that had ever happened to Miles. A great change was occurring within him, moment by singular moment.

Poets were supposed to be in the moment, and also stand outside the moment, looking in. For example, Miles had never noticed before, but Bethany’s ears were slightly lopsided. One was smaller and slightly higher up. Not that he would have cared, or written a poem about it, or even mentioned it to her, ever, in case it made her self-conscious, but it was a fact and now that he’d noticed it he thought it might have driven him crazy, not mentioning it: he bent over and kissed Bethany’s forehead, breathing in. She smelled like a new car. Miles’s mind was full of poetic thoughts. Every cloud had a silver lining, except there was probably a more interesting and meaningful way to say that, and death wasn’t really a cloud. He thought about what it was: more like an earthquake, maybe, or falling from a great height and smacking into the ground, really hard, which knocked the wind out of you and made it hard to sleep or wake up or eat or care about things like homework or whether there was anything good on TV. And death was foggy, too, but also prickly, so maybe instead of a cloud, a fog made of little sharp things. Needles. Every death fog has a lot of silver needles. Did that make sense? Did it scan?

Then the thought came to Miles like the tolling of a large and leaden bell that Bethany was dead. This may sound strange, but in my experience it’s strange and it’s also just how it works. You wake up and you remember that the person you loved is dead. And then you think: Really?

Then you think how strange it is, how you have to remind yourself that the person you loved is dead, and even while you’re thinking about that, the thought comes to you again that the person you loved is dead. And it’s the same stupid fog, the same needles or mallet to the intestines or whatever worse thing you want to call it, all over again. But you’ll see for yourself someday.

Miles stood there, remembering, until Bethany’s mother, Mrs. Baldwin, came up beside him. Her eyes were dry, but her hair was a mess. She’d only managed to put eye shadow on one eyelid. She was wearing jeans and one of Bethany’s old T-shirts. Not even one of Bethany’s favorite T-shirts. Miles felt embarrassed for her, and for Bethany, too.