DEAD IN SPRING

TRIGGER WARNING: death/dead body

A crown of beaded perspiration glosses my turquoise curls, syruping flyaways to my ears. You have a crown of your own, one of tulips and tiger lilies and daisies knotted at the stem. Your lips, blue and flaking from a long winter, lay open. I place a calla lily snipped off Mom's grave onto your tongue--Mom has enough bouquets to bathe in, she won’t miss this one.

“The snow pile is melting, Julius. You remember? The one in Walmart’s parking lot.” You don’t answer, petals blooming from your throat. Above us, in the nature quiet of these woods, small leaves filter clouded sunrays over your skin through web-like crevices.

A small breeze dances through the bark, turning my earth science textbook from photosynthesis to meteoroids, and my human anatomy one from the respiratory system to leg bones.

“Julius, does the wind know the answers for the upcoming exam? You don’t have to take it, but I do, so could you ask? For me?” I slide my adorned denim jacket down my shoulders, letting it graze the damp grass, and lift your soil-stained fingers against my collarbone, pressing your thumb into the rounded indents. Can you feel my warmth?

“My ears are rounding out. See?” I lift your fingers to caress my lobe. “You are missing so much Julius! Spring is here! The snow is melting at Walmart! Herbaceous plants are blooming! My ears are rounding out so I won’t look like an elf like you're always saying!” Like you always said.

You're crying inside, but I want to see your tears, your pity. You should pity my loneliness. It is your fault. You don't know about this moving-on-without-Julius world. You haven’t seen the freckles on this April’s face—signs of foliage dotting the earth in small specks. You haven’t seen the oven Dad installed to make better snickerdoodle snaps, or our caterpillar finally in its cocoon, or the traffic lights they’re installing after your Dodge Challenger crashed into it.

It will be okay. I will show you, Julius.

#

Your knees are lost beneath oxheart seeds—you used to soak your tomatoes in salt, never bothering to wipe the juice off your chin. Your arms hide in a rose bush. People see corpses as more than lawn decoration, and certainly more than a process of grieving.

I pull you across flowered weeds by your clementine Converses—the same ones I gifted to you on Galentine’s Day three years ago. I examine your star-posed body that, from afar, might look like a boy admiring spring and sunbeams.

One leg, wrapped in tethered cotton, bends awkwardly outward, and a vine of dried-fruit scars has dripped dry from your manubrium to ribs. I remember the cigarette rotating between your pink knuckles, and your smirk as you looked at me instead of the road. Maybe if my ears weren’t so sharp you would’ve looked ahead, eyes stuck on the asphalt, and you never would have crashed, and you never would have died.

“Eleanor!” you yell from the open kitchen window across the back lawn, alive. “Bring my body over here so I can get a real good look at it.” 137 pounds is heavy for 114 of thin freckled skin with zero muscle. The grass flattens beneath your weight, and I hope the chuckled chatter across the picket fence doesn’t look over and call the police.

“Where should I put you?” I ask, but realize when I turn my head that no one is there, and you are in my hands, dead—not breathing in sour paint toxins drying on the walls of our new-oven kitchen. Dad chose a cherry red despite my attempts to make him leave the room alone. It looks nothing like it did when Mom was in it.

“We have better things to see,” I assure you because my brain is developing dementia for identifying death, and the part that knows you can’t hear me doesn’t care. To hell with the world. To hell with the world! that’s what you would say.

#

It takes two minutes for the muscles in my arm—ones with names I don’t yet know because they’re on chapter eight—ache from exertion, and it takes two minutes to drag you to our baby blue shed, and another two minutes for me to pull the wheelbarrow out, and many, many minutes for me to comfortably place you in its metal bowl.

My head is heavy, feeling the full weight of my brain, so sensitive each jewel of sweat is like a small thorn on my forehead. My heart is hollow, missing the full weight of emotions I should have but was born without. Maybe if I did produce some chemical sensation of sentiment I would find something wrong with keeping a dead friend so close, numbed inside over two deaths in one month, and I could cry with everyone else and my heart would scar with memories of March, and I could mourn with the masses as the scar opens and bleeds every year. But I can’t. My body is missing the vein that pumps joy, despair, and rage.

It will be okay. I can just watch the world cry.

#

Siamese houses line each street, raised on mini tufts of emerald grass, with lilac hedges guarding each peach wood fence. The children throw broccoli and pebbles over onto the street because boredom has made them this way. Parents—like mine—with priorities, and worlds rotating, but not revolving around their children. An effervescent marble rolls by my pastel toes, reminding me of the Milky Way lumping my bra. I toss the orb towards a boy. It lands in a bush at the base of the fence, out of reach from anyone but the mailman.

“Julius, how come you never taught me how to throw?” I imagine your side-eyed smirk: the one saved only for me, that tickled my heart with something not quite love, but almost. You were the only one.

“It will be okay, I forgive you.” Forgiveness must feel like an itch while you're sleeping, and you want to scratch, scratch, scratch, but your limbs are drowsed numb so you don’t. Then you can’t fall asleep, so you scratch, scratch, scratch, and wonder why you didn’t scratch sooner. Maybe forgiveness feels nothing like that, but how would I know? All I know is Mark Gulligan thinks forgiveness is an itch and will tell you at any one of his seminars.

#

A convenient store is never much to look at—I’ve seen two others besides Blueman’s Stop. Julius, you used to think there was something cool about the crumpled love notes littered beside empty packs of cigarettes on the entry sidewalk and the smell of detergent fish swimming through the air. I guess for some reason you admire the chipped lapis logo boxed over the store: a testament of time, overcoming, by some miracle, a for-sale sign.

The oxidized wheels of the wheelbarrow screech beside the propane tank holder. The glass door vents chilled convenience air, fusing with Old Blue’s cigarette fumes.

“Little lady back. Guessie… bin nursin’ this her can fer ther whole days.” He smiles with a single, dirtied tooth, then spits into his can, stares down the hole, and chokes it back down his throat. You would have laughed and mom would’ve warned me of drug abuse, snarked an insult, and yanked my collar out the store. I stare. And watch.

“I need dill pickle chips.” Old Blue makes duck lips, eyes bulging.

“Been nursin’ them aswell? Yup, yup.” I stare. Staring bores him so he bites the skin of his fingers, a habit he gave to me years ago. The chips fill half an air-blown bag on the nearest aisle beside galloned water and Kit Kats. His credit card machine glitches to life and dies again, so I pull a dollar and the Milky Way from my bra and leave them on his counter.

Spring humidity sticks to my skin, perspiration pearls gathering behind my elf ears. A vulture and crow, somehow peacefully consider how to handle the body beneath a ghost cloth, but they run from my empty threats and dancing hands shooing them away.

“Are you okay Julius?” You say nothing. You always hated birds. Scared of them, but you never admitted it. Oh, how you would flee from our backyard pelicans. Cursing and complaining how they belonged in a prairie lagoon, not my freshly cut lawn. “There aren’t worms here you damn birds!” you’d say. Over and over, but replacing ‘damn’ with something worse each time.

The memory parts my mouth. A smile that brings no joy, but shows my white teeth and raw gums brushed too hard for too long. I remember the weird sensation of laughter. You were the only person who made my heart beat out of rhythm, who brought feelings inside my emotionless void of blood and organs and bones.

“You always did hate those damn birds,” I say, wanting to repeat the words endlessly to see if I can remember each time you said it. But then it works. And I think of you, so I think of your Dodge Challenger, so I think of your barely breathing body suspended in crushed metal, and then I cry. Or I feel like I’m crying. The sky sees my thoughts and makes tears of rain pour from the clouds, landing on my cheek, so I can pretend, for a moment, I am sad.

Water pats down the sheet into an outline of you, seeping through the washing machine holes to pool inside the wheelbarrow. It always rains when I should be sad. A forever favor from the sky to cry when I cannot.

It’s covered now, but I remember your hair when it was wet: stems over your eyes. And you’d never push your hair aside, not until they air-dried into curls. I think you left them there because it made me laugh— a sound I only made with you. My brain aches like my heart should, making you in my mind, so I slide my mother’s sheet off your corpse and let it soak on the street. Three thick strands of hair leak over your eyes. I force my lips to spread; I want to smile so bad! With peeled skin thumbs I press the corners of your lips into a grin; nothing as sly as you used to make, and surely not enough to satisfy me, but I’m glad you’re smiling.

The smile doesn’t last. It wilts back into a dead, pale stare. You’re only frowning because we’ve reached the cemetery gates: where you should've been a month ago, and you hate being late. Mom is here, too, stuffed with soil and cherry-topped with a stone. I could never trap you, Julius. I promise I won’t.

There’s no blood left—I saw each drop stain the intersection asphalt—but still, you are heavy with useless fluids and useless organs and worthless veins. But that doesn’t make you worthless. I know.

Your Converses sink lines into the mud as I pull you from the barrel. You rest against my mother’s engraved name, while I sit and make a mental photograph of my two favorite people, dead or not. I don’t smile. Or cry. Or feel anything but empty. Your only mourner cannot shed tears. A daisy; small, colorless, and emotionless, soaking in passionless grief as sirens bleed through the occupied-parents-with-lonely-kids street. Closer and louder and closer.

People run when they see police. I see it all the time. So I pet a curl behind your ear, and skip from grave to grave, searching for the wind. I’ll need a new friend, and you always came home crying after your runs. “The wind,” you’d say. “It makes my eyes water.”

So I suppose I’ll see what sadness the wind can tell me. Maybe he’ll lift me away like the robins in my yard, away from the tipped-off police and too-busy-for-children town.

I miss you, Julius.

It’s been minutes, I know, but I miss you already.