Dead Not Buried

A wife kisses her husband. It’s not full of passion, just a little peck out of habit. He’s going to work, something he does most days. She doesn’t dream that at 6:00 the car won’t drive up, and the dog won’t run, wagging his tail, for the door. She can’t imagine that her husband won’t come in grouching about those idiots in the main office. It’s not possible, but it happens. She waits a while and wonders. Finally she begins to call. First she dials the office, then friends and eventually the hospitals. While she’s on the phone, someone comes to the door. She rushes to open it, heart in her mouth, but when she sees the uniform she knows. They’ve come to tell her he won’t be coming back, that he’s gone, long gone and there’s nothing she can do.

For weeks she mopes around, missing him some, but terrified as well. Friends try to help her, but they don’t understand. She can’t explain it to them, it’s a secret, and even if he’d permitted the telling, they’d never believe her. They try to get her to go out. “He’s gone,” they say, “you should try to move on.”

The problem is he’s not and she knows it. The old woman had been explicit when she’d taken the glass jar and all the magic it contained. The powder would heal the cancer, his smoker’s lungs, his old football knees and everything else, even death, but it would take longer. “Made by an ancient recipe and blessed by the Devil himself,” the old woman had cackled. “The body will continue always. The soul will fly, but the body will remain.” They hadn’t listened, neither one of them. Thinking through what might happen had been too much trouble. They didn’t care anyway, whatever happened, as long as they were together.

She’d given it to him in his bowl of cereal. In a few weeks he’d stopped coughing, the tumor shrank, and he was climbing stairs again. In a few months, he’d been well. A medical miracle, the doctors said. He was never sick again.

She doesn’t think she can face it. She collects his life insurance, sells the house and moves several hundred miles away, where no one knows her. She begins again, gets a job, buys a new house, and after a few years she begins to feel better. “Silly,” she scolds, “nothing can defeat death, at least not anything from a bottle.” She makes a friend at work. He’s sweet and he likes her. She begins to think that maybe she will get married again. Then she comes home and finds her husband on the doorstep. He’s filthy and still in the clothes she buried him in. She sits in the car a full ten minutes before she gets out. She’s afraid he may be angry, but he’s not.

“I had to walk a long way,” he says. There is no accusing tone to his voice. There is no tone at all. She lets him in and married life resumes. It is hell. He never gets angry, sad, bored, or worried. He shows no love, never laughs or cries. The old woman was right, the soul had flown but the body remains. He walks, talks, eats and drinks, but his eyes are blank and his voice is flat. He feels nothing. She is afraid for him to work, afraid of the questions, forms, and his social security number. She doesn’t know how she would explain to the IRS if they were caught.

The hell becomes unbearable and she tries to think what to do. In a flash of inspiration, she decides to track down the old woman and see if she can help. She goes back to the house, but it has been sold. Hours on the Internet finally score her an address for the old woman’s son. She takes a day off and goes to see him. “My mother’s passed away,” he tells her. “None of us follow the old ways.” He can’t help her, so she goes home.

One day, she pretends to go to work, but goes to the bank instead. She draws out all her money, sells her car, gets a bus ticket, runs away and covers her tracks. It’s useless. In six months, he finds her. She begs him to go away and leave her alone, but he gives her a blank stare. “Where would I go?” he asks. Then he goes and sits on the couch, not watching television, not doing anything. Just sitting. It’s creepy. She has forgotten how much she loved him, when he was alive. She can’t believe how ready she’d been to do anything just to have him with her. Though he is warm and living, she can’t bear for him to touch her. His blank, dead eyes haunt her. The flat sound of his voice makes her cringe.

On the way home from work, she stops and buys a gun. She tells him she’s made a friend at work and that she goes out with her one night a week, but she’s really target practicing. He doesn’t respond. She thinks maybe she should have told him the truth.

One night, she screws up her courage, points the gun at him and shoots him in the head twice. He drops to the floor. She worries that the neighbors may have heard. When the neighbor’s houses are dark, she digs a hole, wraps him in a blanket and buries him in the backyard. She cries about it later. Maybe she should run again, she thinks, but she is too afraid. Three days later, she finds him sitting in the kitchen at the breakfast table, mud clinging to his clothes and hair. “I need to eat,” he says, turning those dead eyes on her. The bullet holes have healed. She runs from the kitchen in hysterics.

Later, she hears him eating the coffee grounds. It doesn’t matter what he eats, he gets no pleasure from food. She wonders if he can starve. The gun is on the nightstand by the bed. Staring at it, she thinks she might kill herself, but then she realizes she hasn’t been sick in years. Looking back, she decides the last time was before she put the powder in the cereal. Could he have somehow passed its magical properties on to her? She is not sure and can’t pull the trigger. She doesn’t want to come back.

A husband touches his wife. It doesn’t mean anything. It is only habit. He doesn’t care when she flinches and wipes her hand on her skirt as if she’s afraid he’s infected her. She hopes it is the last time. Maybe she will catch something at work today and she will know that she can die. She gets in her car and drives to work, catching sight of herself in the rearview. The lines in her face are deeply etched and her eyes are frantic, crazy.

There is a grass fire on the side of the road and traffic is stopped for the fire trucks. Watching the flames, she gets an idea. She doesn’t go to work. There is a gas station and a large discount store nearby. She buys a gas can and some matches. After she fills the can with gas, she goes home. In the garage, she lays out the water hose. She soaks the wooden walls and beams with the hose. Then she calls her husband. As soon as he is in the garage she throws the gas on him and lights him. He just stands there and burns. His skin bubbles and browns with little crackling noises. He doesn't cry out, even when the fat begins to sizzle. The smell is terrible. She worries that the neighbors will come over to see what is on fire, but no one comes.

When he is ash, she sweeps him up and puts him in a plastic bag. For several hours, she drives around town, spilling some of him here and some of him there. For a while, she feels free. She goes to a lawyer and makes out a will, leaving a nephew as heir. It is very clear that she wants to be cremated. If he doesn’t burn her body, her money will go to charity. The house is very quiet and she jumps at every sound, thinking that her husband has managed to defeat her yet. After three weeks she can’t stand it anymore and she puts the gun to her head. This time, the neighbors hear and come over.

The nephew is surprised at how much money there is. He follows her will to the letter, unaware of her terrible secret, or the fact that while he is scattering her ashes in the mountains, the police are picking up pieces of a body strewn all over town. They marvel at the killer who has taken the time to chop up the body and place it in so many different locations. They take the pieces to the morgue, lay them together on a stainless steel table, and cover them with a sheet. It is dinnertime so they take a break. No one notices the pieces reconnecting, energizing, and becoming a whole body again. They don’t even notice when a strange man wrapped in a sheet leaves the morgue. All they know is that someone has taken their evidence. It is a mystery.