Zoe Bocek ’24
A classic, white, low-backed lawn chair behind a classic, peeling-paint, white picket fence atop a well-trimmed, recently groomed, green grass lawn, is where he died with a handmade porcelain mug in his left hand. And when he died, he did not drop the cup right away; it stayed in his relaxed palm upon his thigh, still steaming. Still steaming.
It was no longer steaming. Especially because it had begun to rain after a few hundred units of time. And though the rain wasn’t hard, it was fast and long-lasting, and every time a drop landed in the mug it slipped slightly off to the left of his thigh. The wet denim of his jeans provided good friction. It took quite a few raindrops until the not-steaming-mug tumbled into the muddied grass lawn off to the left of the low-backed lawn chair streaming with water. Hand empty.
At one point he opened his eyes and realized he could move. Wiggled his fingers, reached up to press the glasses further up his nose, but too late realized that he had no glasses on. Confusion. Because when he lifted up his hand, his hand did not rise, and he did not feel his finger contact the spot between his eyes upon his nose where his glasses usually rested. He couldn’t feel his glasses.
He couldn’t feel the flimsy white lawn chair,
He couldn’t feel the cold soft raindrops,
He couldn’t feel the cold at all,
He couldn’t feel the clothes on his body or the breath in his lungs or the tongue in his mouth,
It seemed he had lost his sense of touch entirely,
Which didn’t stop him from feeling a whirlwind of panic and horror, especially as his eyes caught his pale pale pale skin and his ever-paler outline. His eyes caught the porcelain mug which, though it had fallen, rested on its side in the pillowy landing of the grass. The contents within had spread out into the dirt and mud so that it was unclear if there was ever anything in the mug in the first place.
He stood up from the chair.
And tried not to notice that the grass didn’t stamp down beneath his feet.
So instead he looked back to his corpse that sat peacefully in the classic low-backed white lawn chair… pale… gray… sunken…. His glasses were streaking with raindrops so much that he couldn’t have seen anything if he were still in there.
If vomit could rise in his throat, it would.
A dead man sat on a lovely lawn, grass dewy and shivering after a recent downpour, with a peaceful look upon his face, hair dripping the old raindrops. The porcelain mug was now in the grass, sunken into the ground slightly with a few strands of grass curling over it, accepting it into the earth. Unfortunately, the dead man had sturdy rubber soles to his leather shoes and so was barred from the earth’s outreaching grasp.
Even if someone were there to look closer, they would not see the man’s ghost sitting with his corpse, in the same chair as his corpse, in the same position as his corpse. They wouldn’t see the ghost’s eyes lingering on a spot in the distance, nor would they notice the eerie stillness of his outline.
They would just see the pale blue sky that emerged behind those passing rainclouds, and smile at the fact that raindrops still dripped off the trees. Otherwise, it might not have rained at all.
The ghost lingers, as ghosts are known to do.
Ghosts like to see what happens to their bodies.
Usually, when ghosts wake up, their bodies are already buried deep in the ground or contained in an urn.
But sometimes they aren’t.
Sometimes the body is in a hospital bed, braindead, but not bodydead. Those are the weirdest situations. Seeing your living body and knowing the folks sitting around you with some hope left for your soul still being in there are misled, misguided. For some people, that’s painful, but some people don’t have any folks waiting for them there in the first place.
Sometimes the body is in a lake, or a river—unfortunate circumstances as they are—but ghosts don’t usually stick around to watch their bodies bloat and be eaten by fish.
Sometimes the body is off the edge of a cliff, or buried under snow and ice, where you know you won’t be found.
But it’s most rare to find a body in a residential part of town decomposing behind a white picket fence with no living person to find them. Even rich people with no friends would have some agent coming by to see why they haven’t been monitoring their stocks. You know you can’t be complacent for even a moment if you want to keep your graphs in the green. Green lines. Green grass. Nicely mowed lawn.
After an especially biting storm, wind had cocked the corpse’s head to one side, which threw the whole careful balance of the corpse off-kilter. After that storm, the weight of his head started pulling his body to the right (the corpse’s left), and while cautiously slow, the man began to slump down further and further to the right, his upper arm wedged between the weight of his head and torso and the bending plastic of the now off-white lawn chair. The ghost could swear he could feel an ache in that arm, at that specific location. Must have been the placebo effect. Because even in the rancorous cold that was clear from the frost-tipped grass, the ghost couldn’t feel a thing.
Rain and wind came, and went, just as sun and clouds did, but the man did not go. His body still sat, or slumped, upon the dirt-speckled lawn chair. Then, it had not rained in a while and the grass was not quite as crisp and green as it had been on the fateful day so long ago. The ghost tried not to look at the sagging skin of his corpse, or any of the other things.
So instead, the ghost looked anywhere else, cloud-watching, birdwatching, bug-watching, and listened to anything else, cars passing, twigs snapping, nuts cracking in the mouth of a small squirrel. Once he heard before he saw—a loud crash and then a muffled thump, and he turned just in time to watch a bird fall after it had flown straight into the window of the house he used to live in. Hopefully it had just been stunned. One corpse is already one too many, and two ghosts would be far too many. In this mixed moment of relief and brief sadness, the ghost saw another little ghost rise out of the bushes where the bird had fallen. It must have died, after all. On the edge of deciding whether to say something or do something, the man was startled as the little ghost chirped and flew off into the distance.
He stilled for a moment.
And he left his post by his corpse to look into the bushes.
The corpse of the little bird, the chickadee, lay in the dirt.
He looked down at it, then up at his own, then off in the direction the bird had flown.
And he walked away.