I am fascinated and terrified by death. Oh, not my own – that seems easy enough. Though I lived in a funeral home, had a junior-high Halloween party in a different funeral home, and grew up going to town funerals to pay respect, I don’t understand death. The moment between here and not here seems so tenuous. That a heart beats until it doesn’t seems insane.
These days, I can write about death without going to dark places. I won’t allow myself to see just how dark I can get, because the dark places I have been…well, I cannot afford to return. So, I still write about death, just lightly.
On my Patreon site, I am writing a serialized novel for patrons. It is called Stab/Slab and is a dark comedy that mixes funeral business with mob business and hosts some of the strangest funeral-related information I’ve ever come across. You can read it all for a one-dollar per month pledge.
-AS
48 Days Zombie-Free
- Originally posted on a 6s community June 15, 2011 at 3:09pm
Merrily, she sings: “A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a corpse, of course, unless, of course, that corpse is infamously undead!”
I kiss peace to the square metal sign as I enter the room, and her smile consumes the song.
“Here’s to 49, love,” she says with a snap at the wrist of one powder-free nonlatex glove she dons.
We cradle Icy Dedmon in the harness above the table as we pray to whoever censures the boogiemen. We’re a team so someone’s always watching for that first lifelessly animated twitch, which generally comes along once the blood is fully drained and replaced with embalming fluid, but our new solution has given us forty-eight wonderfully dull days of drain, rinse, repeat.
Each of us has left the recipe in a will with words of caution and suggestions should the solution fail and we become another’s nightmare scenario; but as the bloodless body lies dormant upon flat steel, we’re – each of us – absorbed in the fond reflection of forty-eight days.