"Not bad, we didn"t tell your mother, she couldn"t handle it; she isn"t aware of anything anymore anyway. Your sister came...your brother. Ted came, you know, the usual suspects." She sighed at her bad joke and she fell back into the sofa. At that moment Shane began to play a melody. His hands gradually appeared more confident as he fingered the keys.
"What is it that you"re playing?"
He turned from the piano, his hand still pressing the keys, and he looked back at Robin with a curious smile like it was caught between a laugh and a cry. "It"s an old Duke Ellington tune called I Don"t Get Around Much Anymore. Quite appropriate, don"t you think?"
She didn"t like how this was going, but again she was determined to fix it. She would pretend her mood was light. "At least you still have your sense of humor," she grinned while she pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes.
But his face turned sour. "You don"t understand, Robin!" he cried and his voice grew louder. "I can"t feel the notes. I can"t feel the music."
He began to yell. "It"s like I"m a machine!" He smashed his hands down on the keys. A harsh chord followed. "I was an artist, a poet, a musician. And what am I now?"
She vaulted off the couch and stood next to him. Suddenly frightened, she reached for his hand and he abruptly pulled away. "Give it time!" she pleaded. Hadn"t the salesman at DMG told her that things would take time? Or had he said that they had time? Wasn"t Clinger telling her that they had years together, she and Shane? She and this Product?
Ready for anything and prepared for nothing, she looked at him. What had she done? It will get easier in time, she told herself. It must. The thing that matters is we"re back together, so I"ll just keep repeating that thought in my head and that will make it right.
He turned sharply toward her and said, "My grave, I must be buried somewhere, right? A headstone? Do I have a headstone, a plot?"
All the things she didn"t think of when she had imagined their first moments back together. She shuddered. "My G.o.d, Shane, can"t we talk about today instead? Or about our future?"
"I think I have a right to know these things," he said.
It felt bizarre mouthing the words, but she told him, "You"re buried out on Long Island."
"Long Island?"
"I had you buried in my family"s plot. We were going to get married. So I thought...I just wanted you near me always. Your sister told me it would be all right. She knew how much I loved...love you," Robin said as she stepped toward the window and looked down at the traffic below. Here was the view she had always cherished. The cars looked like toys from the thirtieth floor.
It was then that he grasped her shoulder and she shuddered from the unexpectedness of it. "I want to see it," Shane said. "I want to go there. Take me there."
"What? Take you where?"
"Please."
"I don"t understand."
"Neither do I. I just want to see my grave. Take me to my grave."
They stood in silence by the window for what seemed like hours while the sun set over the city.
And that night Robin still found herself alone, still without him, because Shane slept on the couch. But she made sure to recharge her cell phone. Dead things really could be brought back to life, and not just cell phone batteries.
In the morning they made their way down to the car. Robin glanced at the gas pedal before she threw the car in gear; it would be a two-hour drive to Shane"s grave. She turned and watched him sitting next to her. He just stared out the window. She wondered if seeing his grave would fix him, fix them, and she stepped on the gas. The morning mist quickly dissipated from the window as the sun hit the car directly when they pulled into traffic.
She turned onto the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. "Look, it"s going to be a beautiful day. Why don"t we do something else instead? It"s not too late."
"Not too late? Robin, I"m thinking of it as some sort of closure."
She thought what an odd word to use, closure. The word closure was an ending. Wasn"t this a beginning? This was supposed to be a beginning.
And they drove in silence.
When they pulled up to the cemetery, Shane was still silent. Silent as the grave, she thought, and then she felt superst.i.tious at the idea. They parked on a small road across the street from the cemetery and they walked across it. She tried to hold his hand, but he turned away.
As they traveled through the gate, the road turned to dirt. On either side, in front, behind them, everywhere they could see, lay rows and rows of headstones guarded by neatly trimmed hedges and perfectly pinched gra.s.s. The sun was brilliant, warming their faces with the promise of life.
She was about to tell him that she felt the promise of life when she realized they had traveled right in front of Shane"s grave. What came out of her mouth wasn"t anything like she was originally going to say. "Here you are, Shane, this is what you wanted to see." She pointed toward his headstone.
She didn"t like any of this. What was he doing? Why did he drag her here? Hadn"t she already been here, on that terrible day of his funeral, through the pain, grief, and disbelief that the funeral home was lowering the box that imprisoned him, lowering him into the dirt to be forgotten and discarded like he had never mattered to her?
He stood for a moment silently, apprehensively, and then he slowly began to read the writing on his stone aloud. "Here lies Shane Mathew, born July 17, 2011...died November 21, 2037. I am dead."
No! She couldn"t listen to that! She turned to him and whispered, "But you"re not, Shane, you"re back."
"No. I"m not back. Just a broken fragment of me is back, because you"re so selfish."
She was stunned. "What?"
His eyes grew intense. "You couldn"t let me rest in peace, could you? You had to have me back to keep you happy, no matter what. It"s all about you, isn"t it, Robin?"
She fiercely tugged on his arm and said, "I love you, Shane! I couldn"t live a life without you!"
He shook her off. "This is no life, Robin! This is h.e.l.l, Robin, h.e.l.l. G.o.d might forgive you for this, but I don"t. You still don"t realize what you"ve done."
"What do you mean, what I"ve done? We can be together now, forever! You and me."
"Listen to me," his voice cried so loudly it could have shaken the trees. "I am not back! I can"t feel myself. I"m a mind encased in a plastic body. I can"t feel my hands, I can"t feel anything. I can"t taste, or feel or smell anything. I can"t feel you. Do you understand? You have sentenced me to a future more painful than the fires of h.e.l.l. Forever, I will sense things, but I won"t be able to touch them, or feel them. Like a constant torture, the world will always be just within my reach, but I will never be able to fully grasp it. I am dead, Robin, I am dead and awake and aware of my death. I am buried alive. I hate you."
"I can fix things!" she cried while tears began to run down her cheeks.
"Don"t you want to know why I got on that plane in the first place?" he screamed at her. "I was leaving you!"
Quickly, he reached for her and he pulled her down over his grave. She struggled, but his weight was too heavy. He pinned her down and sat on her chest, and then he firmly wrapped his hands around her throat.
"I am going to squeeze the life out of you," he told her as he held her down. "You"re going to die on my grave. The grave you stole from me."
She struggled for air. How could this be happening?
Suddenly her cell phone rang from inside her purse. It broke the spell.
Shane released his grip on her neck and moved off of her. Just as suddenly she felt his weight leaving her body, she rolled, facing the ground, and reached inside her purse. Whoever was calling, she would ask for help.
Strangely enough she heard Clinger"s voice on the line, like a rescue.
"Robin," he told her, "we"re sending Shane over tomorrow."
"What? What are you talking about?" she gasped. "You already sent him...and he"s wrong! He tried to hurt me!"
She could hear that Clinger was still talking, but she realized that she was suddenly alone. She moved the cell phone away from her ear. Where was Shane? Where did he go?
Frantically, she looked around, and her head swerved in every conceivable direction. Headstone after headstone shone like white ruins, but she couldn"t see Shane anywhere. The phone dangled from her hand as she lay back down upon the earth. He"d vanished. Oh G.o.d, had it all been a dream? No! A nightmare.
She sat up and paused for a moment and tried to catch her breath. Slowly she drew the phone back toward her mouth and said, "Clinger, I"ve changed my mind."
About Bruce Memblatt.
Bruce Memblatt is a native New Yorker and has studied Business Administration at Pace University. In addition to writing, he runs a website devoted to theater composer Stephen Sondheim, which he"s lovingly maintained since 1996.
His stories have been featured in such magazines as Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Bending Spoons, Strange Weird and Wonderful, Static Movement, Danse Macabre, The Piker Press, A Golden Place, Eastown Fiction, Short Story Me!, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, Necrology Shorts, Suspense Magazine, Gypsy Shadow, Black Lantern, Death Head Grin, The Cynic Online, The Feathertale Review and Yellow Mama.
In addition, Bruce writes a bi-monthly series for The Piker Press based on his short story "Dinner with Henry." The first installment appeared in March of 2010.
Cheryl Kaye Tardif.
Last spring, while packing away my aunt"s belongings at her lakeside cottage, I discovered this letter in a box of old party games...
February 13.
To Whom It May Concern:.
If you found this letter, it means I"m dead.
DEAD!.
Plain and simple.
And if I"m dead, it"s not by natural causes, I can a.s.sure you. I"m writing in haste cause I know I don"t got much time.
It"s after me!
What, you"re asking. Well, I"ll tell you.
It all started with that gawdforbidden Ouija board. The board that my best friend and I found in her attic.
Liza and I had been friends and neighbors for more than forty-five years. We even buried our husbands within two years of each other. And no, we didn"t bury them in the backyard.
Let me make somethin" clear, first off. I"m not crazy. I"m of sound mind. Maybe not sound body though. I"m not crazy and neither was Liza. I"m as sane as you, whoever is reading this, and what I"m about to tell you is true. TRUE! Not one word is a lie.
My phone rang a few nights ago.
"Liza," I said. "It"s three o"clock in the gawdd.a.m.n morning!"
"You gotta come over, Sharon. Quick!"
"Why do I have to come over now? Can"t it wait until morning?"
There was silence.
I sat up in bed and turned on my lamp. "Liza, you there?"
"I hear voices," she whispered. "There"s someone in my attic."
Liza sounded scared, more scared than I ever heard her before, and her voice gave me a chill up my spine.
"Maybe you should call the police," I said.
"No, it"s not that kind of voice."
Aw c.r.a.p! There was only one other kind of voice that Liza heard.
Ghost voices.
"Be right over," I said.
Liza had been hearing ghost voices all her life. She heard when little Jimmy Barton called from Mr. Porter"s well. The police found his body the next day. Jimmy had somehow fallen in and drowned...three days before. Liza also heard Mrs. Morgensteen calling to her one night to let her cats outside. When my friend got to the old lady"s door, she could smell something rank and awful. The police found Mrs. Morgensteen dead on the floor. The newspapers said she had been dead almost a week.
Anyways, I have to tell you this so"s you can see I"m telling the truth. So you"ll believe me when I tell you what happened next.
After Liza called, I dressed quickly then stepped outside. There was a full moon and a fog had settled over our lane. I remember thinking how strange the weather was.
Ghost weather.
Crossing the street, I walked down the sidewalk to the corner. Liza lived less than a block from me. When I got to my friend"s house, I saw her lights were out. Everything was black. The least she could"a done was put the porch light on for me. So in the glow of the moon I crept up toward her front door, not knowing if I should ring the bell or walk right in.
The door opened with a groaning creak and I jumped.
"Don"t scare me like that!" I hissed, then stood with my mouth open.
Liza Plummer, from 1842 Walker Lane off Aurora Lake, looked like death warmed over. My friend"s thin gray hair was a mess, her eyes were sunken in like she hadn"t slept in a month and she was wearing her natty old housecoat, the one she refused to throw away.
Liza"s a packrat. Can"t let go of anything.
"It"s coming from the attic," she whimpered.
We closed the front door and made our way upstairs. In the ceiling of the hallway there was a trap door. That"s how you got to her attic. Using a broom, we hooked the rope handle and pulled it toward us. The trap door opened andlo and beholda set of steps appeared, ending almost two feet off the ground.
Now Liza and I, we aren"t in the prime of life anymore. She"s 58 and I"m 61. So getting up the first step took a bit of trying. Liza refused to go ahead of me, so I put my foot in her hands and she boosted me to the first step. Then I leaned down and hauled her up behind me. A few minutes later, we were up and poking our heads into the pitch-black attic.
"Dont"cha got a light in here?" I asked her.
She reached into her housecoat pocket and then pa.s.sed me something. "Use this."