Till Death Do Us Part

Despite being watched, the water for that night's spaghetti dinner began to boil. There was an exception to every rule, and more often than not Ethan Myers was it—usually for the worse. Tonight he was a single father making dinner for three, and not for the first time in his life. That had been a week ago when Claire had passed away suddenly.

Well, not suddenly. The cancer had seen to that. And yet, the doctors had given her a good prognosis after the latest treatment and life had seemed brighter than it had been in years for two whole weeks until the complications began. The words "she'll be fine" had never sounded so ominous as the day they'd left.

Hospitals, Ethan thought as he pulled a tomato for the salad from the fridge and set it on the cutting board. Of course it was. The same way mother went. Who can you trust in this world? They drive us into debt and still fail.

The phone rang and snapped him out of his bitterness. He picked it up off the counter. "Hello?"

"Ethan Myers?" A nervous, mousy voice.

"Speaking."

"Thank heavens you're home. How are you holding up?"

"Fine. What's this about?"

"Sorry. I'm just going to get it over with. I've never been good with bad news. Mr. Myers, she's gone."

Really? I haven't noticed, he mused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, someone took the body."

Ethan didn't answer. He watched his fist shaking on the counter as his knuckles slowly turned white.

"... Sir?"

When Ethan answered, his voice was calm. Measured. "I'm here. Thank you for notifying me. I'll be in touch with the police and see what they have to say."

"That's just it. I called them immediately to search the premises, and they—"

A beep from his phone as he hung up. Ethan missed the days when a phone would bang against the receiver, providing a satisfying closure to an unpleasant conversation. Dinner was still in one hour. Ethan took the knife from beside the cutting board and sliced the tomato.

Dinner was on the table at 6:00 sharp. His two girls, ages 13 and 15, sat down and for one hour while the sun set there seemed to be some light in the world yet. He didn't tell them what had happened to their mother's corpse, what that might mean for the funeral that Sunday, or anything else. Instead, he listened to Lily complain about the pop quiz in science and Sophia argue, not for the first time, the pros and cons of getting another dog. Then he told them the one thing he did need to tell them.

"You know, your aunt Abby is coming this Sunday," he said simply. There would be complaints, of course, but her presence was needed.

He'd never heard them complain as much about pop quizzes or pets as they complained then. Abigail, Claire's oldest sister, was responsible to a fault. Fantastic for parents, but not for a teenager.

Hopelessness sank in as twilight turned to dusk as surely as it sank in every year when August turned to September, then October, and finally into the cold, dark winter. The girls watched television in the living room after dinner, then retreated to their rooms for the solitary-yet-not-solitary lifestyle of a modern teenager. Then it was bedtime. Ethan sat on the back porch and smoked his last cigarette while he watched the stars come out. A pistol was in his lap.

"Well," he said, "I guess it's time, old girl." As if to reassure himself, he went on. "Abby will take much better care of them."

Only a coward would come this far without intending to finish it. At least, that was what he told himself when he slipped the barrel into his mouth and tasted the bitter, metallic tang of it. Somehow, that didn't make this feel any more right.

The bushes blocking the pathways to the park rustled, and he loathed the flare of hope that rose in him. A couple walking their dog or a lost dog with a fondness for strangers—anything would do. The gun slipped from his mouth.

Please.

What came out was both horrifying and beautiful. The funeral home had prepped Claire in fine clothes of dark grey that made her almost impossible to see for what she was in the gloom of the night, but in his heart he knew. Too stunned to speak and too stunned to move, he watched her amble across the lawn towards him in the starlight. He'd expected the living dead to look horrifying and to reek of rotting flesh, but decomposition was a long ways off still and they'd done a damn good job of making his wife look like the woman he'd known in life.

Logically, he knew he should have run. Emotionally, he couldn't have torn himself away even if he'd wanted to when she sat down next to him, took his hand in hers, and slipped the pistol back into his mouth just a few degrees to the right.

Claire didn't have to say what she'd come for. Whenever she would curl her fingers against his cheek, as she was doing now, her eyes said it the most. This was true even when her beautiful blue irises were white and filmy.

"Till death do us part," Ethan whispered.

When she answered, it was as dry and as final as the closing of a coffin. "They never said whose death, honey."