Winter 2007 by Subterranean Press

Author:Subterranean Press
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

Fiction: Wandering the Borderlands by Poppy Z. Brite

I have worked with dead bodies for most of my life. I’ve been a morgue assistant, a medical student, and for one terrible summer, a member of a cleanup service that cleaned not household grime but the results of murders and suicides. Presently I am the coroner of Orleans Parish. I handle bodies and things that no longer even look like bodies; I sit alone with them late at night; I look into their faces and try to see what, if anything, they knew at the end. I do not fear them.

And yet not long ago I had a dream. In this dream, I knew somehow that my neighbor was in trouble, and I climbed her porch steps to see if I could help. As I stood at her door, I knew with the unquestionable logic of dreams that she was in there, violated and dead. When I touched the door, it swung open, and I could see that the furniture inside was tumbled and smashed.

“I can’t go in,” I said (to whom?), “the burglar might still be in there. I’ll go back home and call the police.” And that was sound reasoning. But truly, I could not enter the house because I feared seeing the body.

It’s not that I am close to this neighbor; with the modern passion for privacy, we’ve spoken no more than twenty words in the years we’ve lived beside each other. It was not her specific body I feared in the dream. I can explain it no more clearly than this: I feared seeing what her body had become.

When I woke up, I couldn’t understand exactly what I had been afraid of. But I know that if the dream ever returns, I will be just as coldly terrified, and just as helpless.

I saw a man die at my gym recently. I have a bad back from lifting so much inert human weight, and I keep it at bay by exercising on Nautilus machines. On my way to the locker room one hot afternoon, I became aware of a commotion in the swimming pool area. A man had just been found on the bottom of the pool. It seemed likely that he had gone into cardiac arrest, and no one knew how long he had been underwater. Two people – another doctor I know and a personal trainer - were giving him CPR as various gym staffers and members swarmed around. There was nothing I could do. I knew the man was probably dying, and I realized that while I had seen thousands of dead people, I had never actually seen anyone die. I didn’t want to see it now, but I couldn’t make myself turn away. He was barely visible through the crowd of people trying to help him: a pale pot belly; a pair of white legs jerking with the motion of artificial respiration but otherwise dreadfully still; the wrinkled soles of his feet; his swim trunks still wet.

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