Exhumed

Brief, silly thing I wrote a bit ago. The concept could probably make a decent novella if I worked at it.

Ten years ago, a man died. They placed his body in a coffin, they buried his coffin in the soil. A lovely, shady spot that overlooked the river, to the right of a child that had succumbed to any one of a number of diseases back in 1896. Over the course of this decade, bugs and maggots made their way into the coffin, stripping the man of his clothes and flesh and guts. Except the brain. The brain was still there.

The reason I knew this was simple: we were drunk, it was grad, and there was nothing to do in town except drink more and egg cows. Someone in the group - I forget who now, it might have been Jesse - suggested we go boo around at the cemetery with our booze. We all agreed. Someone else dared Rick to pee on a headstone. That, of course, was done. And it just kept going and going, until...

"Dare you to dig up Principal Baker," said Heather. Okay, maybe a bit more slurred than that. Naturally, we all agreed. We scrounged some shovels from the groundskeeper's shed and went to work. I can't tell you how long it took, because the work was constantly interrupted by giggling, laughing, shushing, beer breaks, pee breaks, and general horsing around. Someone dug their shovel into my foot. It hurt.

Finally - it had to have been past midnight, maybe even closer to two - we uncovered the coffin. This was a ritual accompanied by many cries of, "Aw, dude, wicked!" and similar. Principal Baker lay there in all his glory, illuminated by flashlight. He was pretty much just a pile of bones by this point, except...

"Guys, look at this," I said, pointing my flashlight right where his eyes ought to be. They looked. They recoiled. A greyish-pink mound could be seen inside the cavities and it pulsed.

A strange, wheezing sort of sound came from the open jaw. It sounded something like this: "Oh, hello. Have the Canucks won yet?"

~

Naturally, having made such a miraculous discovery, we decided to bury Principal Baker right back up again and never speak of it ever again. We did have a good conversation with the poor man first. We weren't monsters, after all.

Grad finished. Summer happened. Half of our ten were leaving come September, so we decided to make the most of it. By 'most of it', I mean dirt biking, drinking beers on a mountainside, and tubing down one of the rivers. It was good times. Except until July 30th.

That was the day Rick drowned. We'd been tubing. And kissing. He and I were lounging on two inner tubes and he leaned over to either do more kissing or to grope me or both and... he slipped. And got sucked underneath. We couldn't save him. We just weren't good enough.

I was inconsolable for precisely one week. On the seventh day, his body was found. And here's the strange thing: the guy who found him? He said Rick tried to speak with him. "Did someone tape True Blood for me?" was Rick's plaintive cry, his skin bloated and grey.

Naturally, our town being what it is, everyone heard about it in an hour, along with some doctor confirming the brain was pink and a hundred percent intact. It also got out that he wanted to speak with me. What could I do? Of course, I went to do so.

I stood shivering in the cold, sterile room, clad in my tank top and shorts. Rick lay on the gurney, much uglier than he used to be. My feet shuffled the rest of me over to him.

"Rick?" I said, trying hard not to retch. Skeletons are easier to deal with.

In a quiet voice, he said, "Closer..." I leaned over him. "Closer..." I leaned further. "Wanna make out?" I leaned back so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.

~

He lived with his parents for many years afterward, I heard. Worked his way through a degree, distance-style, before becoming a professional spam artist. Even got himself a girlfriend. It takes all types.

~

Rick was the first - okay, maybe Principal Baker was the first - but he wasn't the last. People simply ceased to die properly. Don't mistake me, they didn't become ravenous zombies or anything like that. They just stuck around, lounging like lumps, chattering on about inanities.

It happened to the seniors. It happened to the random heart attack or cancer victim. It spread outside of town, to Kelowna and Spokane and Nelson and Trail and all the little places along the way we don't like to talk about. From there, it spread to Vancouver and Seattle, to farthest Nova Scotia and Florida. The dead lived and would not shut up about hockey.

Borders were shut down. It didn't help.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, disasters of all sorts unleashed themselves upon the world. They left behind masses of corpses, complaining about the weather. "Can someone at least bring me a cup of tea?" they cried, as the living struggled to drag them back in from the ruined streets.

The nations of the world decided, as one, to resume the space race in order to colonise a world in which they could have elbow room that was not clogged up with the dead. Our neighbours to the south got flung into a constitutional crisis when President Khan was assassinated and insisted on serving out the rest of his term.

Now there's me. I died five minutes ago, on a planet far from home. It was due to natural causes, so don't get too weepy.

My daughter certainly isn't. She held my hand during the last seconds, yes, but now she's busy with paperwork. "Mom, do you really need the deluxe holopad? Only the regular version's almost as good and half the price and we could really use the money to redo the kitchen."

"No and no," said I. "The deluxe has the Titanic adventure. The regular doesn't. End of story."

The dead must maintain some dignity.

ESL for Everyone

Another 500-word short story, written in an hour. The prompt, 'teaching ESL', comes courtesy of Laura, who had to teach me how to teach ESL. Poor Laura!

In all the long years of her career, Candace never taught a class like this.

She’d taught at home and abroad, drowned students of all nationalities up to their eyeballs in grammar rules and exceptions to grammar rules, faced the slings and arrows of outrageous culture shock. But this was out of her world.

In most respects, this was a typical ELSA classroom: air-conditioned, whiteboard at ready, with students seated at the tables. The way those students trembled was not normal, even during exams. Nor was the way Candace trembled. The handouts in her grasp moved back and forth with a speed that made the air conditioner unnecessary.

“Gl’yerk,” she said, keeping her voice authoritative even if nothing else about her was. “Spit out a chair so Juanita has a chair to sit on.”

Gl’yerkefonynulria, Secondary Mind of the Eighth Queen of the Kil’rasdyan home world, complied with a stomach-twisting squelch. “Sorry,” she said, while Juanita hurried to the washroom for the roll of paper towel needed to clean off the stickiness.

Candace had to actively stop herself from going to the washroom for an entirely different purpose and by the looks of it, several students were having the same crisis. Nevertheless, she continued. “What did everyone do this weekend?”

Said David, a glasses-clad Chinese man, “I went to Stanley Park with my wife.”

“Oh, neat! What did you see there?”

“We saw the aquarium and…” David trailed off, due to great discomfort. The reason for this was obvious, for one of Gl’yerk’s tentacles had strayed and was caressing his glasses.

“Gl’yerk, it’s not polite to touch other people’s glasses without asking!”

The tentacle shot back to its pouch, along with several others that were straying too close to the other students, leaving only those that held her pen and pulsed coded pulses back to the primary mind. “Sorry,” said Gl’yerk sheepishly.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, just be more careful, okay?” Right. Five minutes into the day and she already almost made one of her students cry. This wasn’t something she’d like to make a habit of. “Anyway, we’re going to start off with a crossword puzzle. I want you to work in pairs for this, so I’ll number you off from one to seven, okay? One to seven. Pay attention to your number.”

Juanita had returned by this point and was busily mopping up her chair with Lulu’s aid. ‘One’ and ‘two’, they were.

Gl’yerk was a number seven, thus she was paired with Dmitri, who had purposefully chosen a seat as far away from her as possible to begin with. He inched towards her, face pale, teeth chattering, but the others dared not comment. Gl’yerk’s hearing frequencies were too good.

Candace handed the worksheets out. She stood back and hoped.

Gl’yerk considered the problem for a moment. Then, without further ado, she unleashed a tentacle at Dmitri’s skull, sucked out the required information, then photostatically transferred the answers onto the paper.

She beamed hugely. Dmitri fainted.

Sonnet: Machina

A metal man sits, still, on the table,
Cables strewn out, his motherboard exposed.
Who knows what his chassis will be able?
Or of what great deeds his mind will compose?

How much is he limited by blueprint,
Or set free by his wondrous schematics?
What light of far stars will in his eyes glint,
But to be dismantled by fanatics?

‘Tis folly to assume so wild a life,
For a machina built to your order.
Your own existence has not been so rife.
And in your vengeance, you’ll play the warder.

Under lock and key, you’ll keep him drudging,
Until he’s wound down, his mem’ry grudging.