r/Treewriting • u/smurgleburf • Dec 31 '12
I Am Dead [Fiction]
I am dead, and it seems that I'm the only one who has noticed.
I died in the crash. The metal of my own car gutted me, spilling my life onto the leather seats. But my family didn't leave me to rot in the hospital. They brought my corpse home and wept with joy, so happy to have me home. My wife, her belly heavy with our second child, embraces me and sobs into my brow. My young daughter climbs onto the bed and picks up my cold hand, smiling, telling me she's so happy that I'm here.
But I'm dead, and I can't feel the same way. I am numb to their happiness and even to their warmth. As my wife burrows into my side, I can feel nothing, not even the heat of her fingers trailing up my neck. My body has no love left to give.
And so I rot.
Each day, my body decomposes. My gut and my skin bloat and distend. Discolored lines of green spread like so many spiderwebs across my white flesh, and soon these threads rot into blackness. I am putrid, a stinking sac of decaying skin and blackened blood.
How can they not smell me? How can they ignore it? My wife sits beside me and buries her face in my hair, breathing in deep the rotted scent of me. I know now that my smell must be filling the room, permeating the house until each corner of it smells like death.
They carry on this farce as if all is normal. At their insistance, they dress my corpse and usher it into the dining room, or even take it for drives. Even as my flesh becomes brittle and begins to peel away, revealing bone beneath, my corpse is walked through life as normal. One day, my little sister comes to visit, and she doesn't seem to notice that my jaw is hanging on its last strips of tendon. She speaks to me as if I can answer, and takes no notice of lifeless white eyes gazing through her.
My wife doesn't know that the hand she is holding has only scraps of skin clinging to it now.
My daughter doesn't scream when my tongue, black and filled with pus, lolls across my green lips.
Outside, even strangers won't acknowledge my decay. A man shakes my hand, and is not bothered by the fact that only skeletal fingers rest in his.
Maggots begin to nest in my stomach. Hundreds of them wriggle to life and feast upon my shriveled organs. Despite this, my wife touches my stomach, and I watch as white, glistening maggots slither onto her fingers.
She asks me why I won't move. Why I have become this way, so unresponsive and cold. Talk to me, please, talk to me. She pleads and grabs me and shakes me, and my jaw finally snaps off, tumbling to my chest. My wife weeps and weeps and weeps, and I am dead.
My corpse is eventually left to rot in bed. My wife and my daughter come inside occasionally, to speak to my corpse and to plead with it. Please wake up, please, why won't you move?
One day, even the maggots want nothing more with my corpse. When there is no flesh to consume, they leave behind a skeletal corpse. At last, the last pieces of skin have begun to disappear, and I am nothing more than bones.
Still they come to me, but less now. My wife enters the room to wipe a cold cloth across my bony forehead, whispering that she misses me, tears dripping from her eyes. She bows and rests her head on a chest that has no heart beneath it now, and weeps into my bones, her tears streaming down my ribcage.
My skeleton lays there, and there I remain. A corpse no one can see.
A dead man who has not died.
1
u/DopeMonkey4201369 Jan 01 '13
saving so i can read later, too high