His legs had been swept from under him, mangled under tires until his guts almost looked like strawberry-jam, maggots infested the crevices of his body that had been ripped apart and mangled and decorated with deep-etched tracks by tires. I couldn’t make out anything of him besides the maggots and the rot; that mind-numbingly disgusting rot. My dad was unphased, weirdly so, by the mangled corpse of a boy my age, plastered in the middle of the road and melting into concrete under the sun. I turned away from it and shut my eyes tightly, unable to look at it anymore.
My dad glanced over at me. He was wearing a jersey, for the 49ers, I know because he has owned that shirt since before I was born. It’s old and red like the corpse in the road. “You alright?”
I was baffled, and nauseous. Very nauseous. I couldn’t get it out of my head; those maggots crawling out of a deep tear in his skull, maggots wiggling throughout the ripped and rotted skin that made it’s way down the middle of his face. Ripping his features right in half, and those maggots were dancing in it. In his rot.
Finally, I managed, “You don’t,” my stomach pulled itself in and I gagged into the palm of my hand, “you don’t see that?”
The car slowed down. “.. see what?”
I forced myself up and I wrapped my arms over my stomach as I turned to look out the window.
It was gone. The body was gone. The smell was gone. The maggots were gone. The rot was gone. It was all just gone. All of it.
My lips parted and gaped. I probably looked really stupid; like a fish looking for water.
”.. Nevermind.” I breathed out, sinking down into the passenger’s seat.
“What? What was it?” My dad sounded worried, almost.
”.. It was nothing.”
“Fiona.”
“It was really just nothing, I thought I saw roadkill. Sorry.”
When I was twelve, my mom killed herself.
It happened at 2:37 PM. I get out of school at 2:00, it’s a fifteen minute drive home when my dad picks me up. He was at work that day, somebody took off and his manager asked him to come in. He was working at the deli at the tiny, local supermarket on second street at the time. Usually when this happens, I get on the city bus, because I hate the school bus. It was a five minute wait for the bus. I got picked up at about 2:06, because the bus had to stop and the old man that lives at the top of the street my school sits on and two other older kids from school got on before me. I remember sitting at the very back, my bruised, rosy knees were pushed together uncomfortably and I was anxiously rolling the strap on my backpack around my finger. The bus ride was thirty minutes, because the bus was extremely slow and had to stop at three different stops. The two older kids were sitting next to each other and talking to each other about something Jennifer B. said at lunch the whole time. I was left with the old man, who always kind of made me uncomfortable. I remember him looking back at me and flashing me a grin that I just found kind of gross. I was last off the bus.
It was 2:30 when I got off, it was a six minute walk home in the autumn breeze, with leaves falling around me and puddling into large mountains. A cheap, scratchy doormat with a vomit-green witch covered in warts on a broom was sitting in front of our door. I remember it had the words “Trick or Treat!” on it, and there was a speech bubble as if the witch was saying it. I pushed open my front door and pulled off my shoes and tossed my backpack near the door. Usually my mom was sitting on the couch or in my parents’ room, sleeping. My entire life, she slept alot. She was never up in the morning to help me get ready for school, and she was always asleep before I could say goodnight to her. If I was lucky, she was awake for dinner, but would go to bed before neither me or my dad were finished. Almost every night, it was just me and my dad. She wasn’t on the couch. I went upstairs and noticed that the bathroom door was cracked open. I’m still not sure why I looked. I slowly walked towards the door. I remember the air being really thick, weirdly thick. I kind of felt like it was hard to breathe. It was like how it feels on a really hot, muggy day. Like the day I saw that body in the road.
“Mom?” I muttered as I pushed open the door. My mom was staring into the mirror. There was a kitchen knife, a jaded-edge one with a scratched black handle, sitting on the sink. My mom pushed her dirty blonde hair off her shoulders, slowly pulling her fingers through it, before she reached down and grabbed the knife.
“Mom?” I repeated. It was almost like she didn’t hear me, or she was ignoring me. She turned to me, tightly gripping the knife in her hand. Her grip was so tight I think her head was turning red from it. Her eyes were glossy and puffy with tears, and she was wearing the pajamas she went to bed with the night before, even though she usually would’ve changed by then.
“I’m so sorry, Fiona.” And with that, she plunged the knife into her chest. Her mouth gaped and gasped and I will never forget the way her chest spasmed with each stab. I remember blood spurting from her chest, staining the knife, some of it sprinkling onto my shirt and arms. I didn’t fully register what was going on at first, I guess. It was all happening so fast, like a snap. She stared at me with with those wide, bulging eyes the whole time. Until she slowly buckled to her knees and I finally found it in myself to run down the steps and, covered in my own mother’s blood, I called 911.
I still remember almost every detail leading up to it and what happened after. An ambulance and police showed up in about fifteen minutes. My mom, who was barely breathing and was gasping for air, was carried out the house and put on a stretcher, pushed into an ambulance and taken away. Our house was illuminated with flashing navy and red lights, and I could hear the sirens from inside the house. They were like a baby wailing; over and over and over and over. They just kept going. Two officers, who I actually don’t remember what they looked like; despite remembering almost everything else, walked inside and found me with my knees huddled up to my chest on the cold kitchen floor. I remember the smell of the house. It was nauseating, that metallic and pale smell. It almost seemed like it was apart of my imagination, like it wasn’t there, but I could smell it. It was all over me. With blood still sprayed across my entire torso, the officers carried me outside and sat me onto the porch and threw a heavy, warm shock blanket over my shoulders. The blanket only really made the smell stronger because of how warm it was, so I remember just wrapping it over my legs.
My dad almost knocked our mailbox over with how quickly and roughly he pulled into the driveway. He jumped out the car and looked over at the pool of officers and police cars in the road, and then he looked over at me, with wide eyes, and he ran over to me and hugged me.
“Fiona, what happened?”
That was when I first cried.
My mom was pronounced dead due to suicide that same night. I remember watching her blood drip it’s way down into the drains as I showered. I hated having to wash her off of me. My dad insisted on cleaning it first. That entire night, I could hear my dad’s exasperated sobs as he wiped my mother’s blood off the walls and the floors. I didn’t sleep. The next morning, my dad dropped off my blood-soaked clothes and the knife at the police station as requested. I took a month off of school; within that month was the funeral.
My dad had to plan it by himself. My eulogy was written on a tiny, ripped piece of paper, in scribbled, dark pencil. I could only get about half of the first sentence in before the image popped in my mind; the knife plunging in her spasming chest over and over and over again. My dad had to read my eulogy for me, his voice wavering and thick as he read it.
My mom’s body in that casket was more creepy than comforting. It was uncanny. I watched her die and now her lifeless eyes were staring up at me.
I wasn’t told what made my mom kill herself. It was kind of like everyone treated me like the clueless child who should know nothing. One time, I caught my dad on, I guess, a good day, and he would tell me that my mom was always dealing with things that were happening in her mind. Things that were hard for everybody, including her, to understand, and she just cracked under that pressure. I think the idea of her having some type of mental illness is more comforting than there just not being a reason at all. My dad got fired from his job shortly after because he was always late, despite the efforts I made to wake him up and get him out of bed every morning. I almost failed the sixth grade. Which is kind of embarrassing to type out. If it hadn’t been for my dead mom, I would have repeated, but they gave me a sympathy pass.
That dead body in the road was not the last I saw of it.
It tries to catch me off guard. I’ve gotten used to it enough that I don’t freak out the way I used to. I understand that nobody else can see it, but it’s still real. It’s very real. No matter how.. insane, I guess, this sounds I promise you the bodies I see are as real as my mom’s lifeless body in that casket.
It, I guess I’ll call it, takes the form of dead bodies. The bodies of people I don’t know. They haven’t talked to me or anything else. They’re just there. I realized very quickly that nobody else can see them, but they are real. I’ve never touched one, of course, because that’s disgusting and the smell is so strong that I think I would actually puke if I touched one. They’re real– not real enough to cause any physical disease– but real enough that it bothers me.
This morning, there was a woman. Long, dead strands of raven hair hung off her head and draped down her body. She was hanging from the branch of the tree sitting in front of my school, pale feet dangling just above the head of a senior girl, sitting next to a senior boy and sneaking a cigarette right in front of the school. I thought about how obvious and stupid that was. I thought about how unaware they were that a lynched woman was hanging right above them.
I try to ignore it. The only reason I’m writing this is because I want somebody to, I don’t know, believe me. I haven’t told anybody because I know they would never believe me. It sounds insane, I know. It sounds just so.. insane and not real and just totally fake and I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m apologizing, maybe because I know how insane I sound. “You’re just grieving!” I feel like someone might say.
Thats the thing; it didn’t start until this year.
If I am just grieving, and this is just some sort of grief-induced schizophrenia or something, wouldn’t it have started after my mom died? It wouldn’t have waited three years, right? Or is that just optimistic? Hallucinations aren’t this real. They can’t be.
I barely talk to my dad anymore, because I’m scared I’m going to let it slip one day and he’s going to think I’m absolutely insane and, I don’t know, throw me in a psych ward or something. He gets worried about me though, I can tell. He tries to somehow insert himself in my life more. He comes into my room to say goodnight to me some nights. One night I remember almost gagging as I heard the squish of his bare foot in the pile of mashed organs sitting on my bedroom floor, which I had to sleep in the same room as the entire night, until morning, when it was just gone.
Sometimes, I feel like the bodies can see me. Maybe not through their eyes, but somehow, they can see me. Watch me. That sounds insane. I know, but I know, deep down, that I am not lying. The truth is, I’m scared. I’m scared like crazy that this thing, whatever it is, that pretends to be dead people and watches me and stares at me, will one day stop the charade and will one day either say something or do something or hurt me or something. I think the scariest part is that I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s capable of, or why it’s doing this to me, or what it even is.
I’m scared to tell anyone I know. So I tell you, abunch of strangers on the internet. The only thing I ask of you is to just believe me.
Please.