The Not Dead

[Will_Couper]

Look over there at that pretty girl. No more than nineteen. She smiles at you. Her teeth are white and perfect, perfection that continues in her jawline and bone structure. Her eyes are a wonderful brown colour which dance with intriguing mischievousness. Her hair catches the sun with a liquid metallic sheen. Your gaze, with the inevitable curiosity, moves down her body and all you can see is the potential for more wonders to see beneath those clothes.

She is an arresting sight. She is the kind of woman, for those who are prone to it, to write poetry about.

There is something wrong with her though. You can’t pin down what it is, but underneath the wonderful eye-catching veneer there is something makes your insides squirm. You want to look away from this beauty, even though everything else within you says that you want to look at her and drink in the sweet nectar of her beauty. A countering instinct presses at your heart and your stomach and sickens you, making you want to recoil, pretend you never saw her at all.

You have no basis or experience on which to place this odd conflict. It is puzzling and disconcerting. The sun no longer warms you. The people wandering around enjoying the weather have no effect on your mood either. Even the good things in your life have become less significant as you look at this girl.

Hiding seems to be the best way to deal with this, yet the memory of how you feel now would be impossible to flee from. You won’t be able to sleep for a long while, as that memory works its way into your mind, driving further in like a barbed spike. It may lead to madness, it may lead to some less severe malady, but the effect will be indelible.

You will be haunted, I can guarantee it. You won’t be able to erase from your memory how gorgeous she looks. It will be just as impossible to reconcile this with the bizarre and deep revulsion you feel looking at her.

I can see that you are confused. How could I know that, right? I’m no mind reader, let me assure you.

The fact is I know those thoughts all too well. Although I don’t quite understand how you could miss why. It’s not as if it was ever a secret, as impossible to hide as it was.

The girl you are looking at right now, along with millions of others, stopped being dead.

No one knows how it happened, or exactly what happened. They just stopped dying. There’s no term for what they are. We know what they aren’t. They aren’t zombies, vampires or ghosts. They aren’t alive either. They haven’t been resurrected, so being alive doesn’t work.

Supernatural explanations can’t begin to cover what is happening. A few religions have claimed it as an act of whatever gods they worship, but it is non-denominational as far as anyone has been. People of every race and creed have stopped being dead. It has made a mockery of a number of faiths.

My first exposure to one of them was two years ago; yes, it’s been that long. The phenomenon seems to happen in waves, so that not every dead person returns to life. I don’t know which wave this was from. There must have been at least twenty since then; how many there were before hand I have no idea.

That day I was just at home, I’d taken a day off work. I was in the middle of a personal crisis and I felt that being away from the place was the right thing to do. I was edgy. Likely to fly off the handle at someone over nothing. The amount of explanation needed after that was something that I couldn’t handle in the twitchy emotional state I was in, so I stayed away.

I was messing around my house, just doing the things you do when you have an unexpected day off work, not always useful things, but things nonetheless. Those things didn’t stop me from looking out the window onto the street, that was pretty empty at that time of the day. People would be, unlike myself, at work and kids would be at school. There was little foot traffic, so the man walking at a brisk pace down the street was conspicuous.

For several seconds all I could do was stare. I knew the man well. After all he had been my neighbour for seven years. At first I was caught up in disbelief, the man walking up the street couldn’t be the man I thought was walking up the street. I had been to his funeral a month or so before.

When he got closer, it was clear that it was that very man. He acted just as he had in all those years I had known him, smiled the same, greeted other neighbours the same. I knew I wasn’t mad as I saw those other neighbours look at him in fear and confusion. I found out that he had gone to the local shop to buy his daily paper just he had done up until the day he died.

That feeling described to you hit me too. It was both fascinating and repellant. This was a man I had known and liked, but looking at him now was an effort and made me queasy.

It was a moment I knew, down to my marrow, that the world had changed and everyone would be touched by the change. I don’t know how often these moments happen. Once in a generation? Once in ten?

Whichever is applicable, I was faced with such an event that day. Beneath the feeling of almost-revulsion I felt the world shift under my feet, sliding on the grease of change to a new paradigm. And all I could think of to do was go out and say good morning to him. We had a nice conversation during which he thanked me for attending the funeral and asked me how I was getting on.

Afterwards I went into my house and vomited for three solid hours.

It’s amazing how the human mind reacts to these strange things. A defence mechanism I would guess.

Here we are, two years later, and most of us have gotten used to these people who are not alive but act just as they did when they were. There are those cannot and will never accept what happened, they will die out in a generation, or they will join the new demographic of the population.

That’s the upside to these new people: they forgive. Whatever you did to them in life, however reprehensible and hideous, they will still be your friend. They seem to have lost their capacity for hate.

This is why the girl I was referring to is still with me, even though the day before I saw my neighbour I felt the cartilage of her windpipe pop under my thumbs as she clawed at my face. I love her so much. I won’t lose her again.

[poprock]

This is the first piece of fiction posted up for discussion/advice/further polishing/whatever. So far, I’ve tidied up the typography and nothing else (giving it paragraph breaks, correcting punctuation, spelling, and so on).

Get collaborating then, what do you suggest needs doing with it next?

[Zero]

Would it perhaps be better to put the edited version in a different post, and mark the changes in bold? Then people can compare the 'before' and 'after' versions.

[poprock]

Aye, that’s the intention. This was sat in the editing queue for consideration as a front page piece and thus work had started on it already. Won’t happen again. Like I say, all that’s been done is paragraph breaks, punctuation and spelling.

[Potatojunkie]

Descriptive prose needs a plot framework to hang from, which means that events need to happen. Usually this will involve characters interacting with each other and/or their environment. Your closing line, with the revelation that the narrator killed his woman, that's an event, but most of the preceeding text is descriptive scene-setting. The key to good storytelling is to allow events to unfold with as little descriptive clutter as possible.