Dead

By Sophia Bosma

We found her on a Monday morning. Half her jaw was jutting out of the muddy ground. It had rained all night and dampness hung in the air, refusing to leave. My mother was the first to see her. There were tendrils of hair sprouting from the dirt and my mother fell to her knees, drenching her pants in mud. My sister stopped and stared, mouth agape, mirroring the body. I saw her last, once their busy hands had already begun to uncover the rest of her head. The three of us gathered dirt and sticks and leaves beneath our fingernails, clawing away at the ground, all panting and wordless.

Once unearthed, I crouched beside her contorted head. “Hello,” I whispered to her. The only answer was the slow rising crickets of dawn. I traced a finger along her brow. It was cold and sticky. I traced along my own.

“Does she look like me,” I asked my mother.

“Shh,” my mother said, “help me carry her back to the house.” I grabbed an arm and we marched back home with the limp body between us.

We lowered the body into the bathtub and my mother turned on the water, testing the temperature to make sure it was warm. “Do you think she looks like me,” I asked my sister. She shrugged and we sat close as my mother washed all the dirt and bugs and rotten bits off the body. Once, I thought I saw her eyes open, but then they were closed again. They were brown like mine.

After the body was clean, my mother put her in one of my shirts and propped her up in a dining room chair. I sat beside her and filled her plate with beef and potatoes and rolls of bread. A few times she slumped forward and I reached out an arm to hold her up.

“Do you have a name,” I asked her, but she didn’t answer.

“Eat your dinner,” my mother told us. But I couldn’t help the way I stared at the body beside me. Her head hung to the side, leaning against her own shoulder. It could have been a trick of the light, but her chest seemed to rise and fall in short, spastic motions. Nothing she did was purposeful or human. It all looked wrong. She didn’t even touch her potatoes.

“She’ll sleep in your room,” my mother told me, and we lugged her up the stairs. We laid her gently in my bed beneath the covers.

“Good night,” my mother said, and shut off the lights. With the dead body and darkness, my room was no longer my own. I opened the curtains to let in the moonlight, and when I turned back, her pale face was illuminated.

“Hello,” I said. I crept toward her and slid myself beneath the covers. “Can you hear me? Are you there?” She said nothing, but her ribcage flinched. I reached out and laid a hand against her back. My hand rose and fell and beneath it was some sort of strangled life I couldn’t explain.

I woke to a cold, empty bed. There was singing coming from downstairs, slow and lilting. Everything was so familiar, like it was plucked from a memory. I thought I had certainly dreamed the events of the previous day, the strangeness of the dead girl, and the uncanny way she wore my face.

The door to my room opened and my sister stuck her head through the crack.

“She’s awake,” my sister said.

“Who?”

“The girl,” she said, “the dead girl.”

Downstairs our mother had made a feast of eggs and bacon and toast to feed the dead girl, who was sitting precariously upright at the table. I circled the dining room like a predator until I came to face her. Though her eyelids drooped, her eyes were open. And brown. Like mine.

“Eat, eat,” my mother encouraged. The dead girl’s eyes lolled to the fork but the rest of her remained motionless. My mother picked up the fork and began feeding her. Then my mother cupped her jaw and helped her chew. I lowered myself to try and meet the dead girl’s eyes.

“What are you,” I asked.

My mother threw a napkin at me. “What a thing to say so early in the morning.”

“Well shouldn’t we know what she is?” my sister said from behind me. Her small frame clung to me.

“We must take care of her, that's all.” My mother said this like it was explanation enough, like it answered even the most poignant and essential questions. And I guess in a way it did.

For days we sank into a routine, forgoing morning walks and instead feeding the dead girl breakfast and setting her out on the patio to enjoy the sun. At night she laid wordlessly in my room and I got less and less sleep. I wanted to see more. I wanted her to move or speak or cry out for something that had been taken from her. I wanted life to ebb around her, but the only life that did was us as we dressed her and fed her and bathed her and made sure she got to feel the sun on her drab, molted skin.

After a while she smelled less like rotted flesh and more like me. She used my soaps and my clothes and my blankets. I brushed her hair with my combs. I even sprayed her with my perfume. “Is it better?” I asked her one evening as I freed the tangles from her hair. “Is it better than it was before?”

Her brown eyes were wide open, reflecting back at me in the mirror. They weren’t quite the deep brown of my own, they were cloudy and unfocused. She watched me and I watched her and a part of me expected her to reach out or fall to the floor or scream. But her eyes, trained on me, grew smaller, almost squinting. Her cheeks, despite their hollowness, rose, bunching what skin and fat she had left up below her eyes. And finally I watched a slow, lopsided smile expand on her mouth. Like everything else she did, it was unnatural. I turned her body around, so I could see it on her face instead of through a reflection, but once I did, it was gone. Her face returned to that sunken expression, same as when we had found her.

We went to bed, and that night I turned her body so that she faced me. Her eyes were unflinching and I stared back. We laid like that for hours and neither of us said anything at all. But I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the bone-deep knowledge that behind her eyes was something else. Something horribly true.

“Do you dream?” I whispered.

She blinked at me and a jolt ran up my spine. I took my hand and covered her eyes with it. Then I raised it. Then I covered them again.

“Do you see the shadows?” I moved my hand away. And when I did, I saw her eyes had closed. “Do you like the dark?”

A smile grew on her face, smaller this time, but still warped. This close I could see the crooked and broken teeth in her mouth. Some were missing, some were chipped off—some had turned black. After a while the smile faded, but her eyes remained shut.

Another week went by before she spoke. My sister, the dead girl, and I were sprawled on the grass in the backyard as my mother circled with her gardening shears, cutting back weeds and trimming overgrown ivy vines. The backyard was a wonderful place. There were garden beds of red and purple flowers stalked below by low-growing herbs. Trellises woven tight with vines and creeping plants all stretching and reaching and binding together. The grass was dainty and lush and I rubbed my head into it, filling my hair with dirt and bugs. My sister laid on her stomach, drawing in a small blue journal. The dead girl stared at the blue sky and the clouds that draped across it.

I was weaving my fingers through blades of grass when the first noise came from the dead girl’s mouth. It was staccato and airy, like she was trying to clear her throat without drawing attention. Her chest heaved, her lips parted, and her jaw fell to the side, lopsided and uncontrolled. Air left her lungs in sporadic puffs. I inched closer and saw a few ants and a beetle crawl out of her mouth and return themselves to the earth. I peered over her head, blocking the sky from her eyes. She released a strangled noise and her eyes locked on me.

In a rasping, flimsy voice she said: “You look just like me.”

My sister dropped her pencil and my mother stopped her weed killing.

I smiled at the dead girl. “That’s what I said.”

“Am I supposed to be here?” she asked.

My mother crouched down beside us. “Of course,” she said. But the dead girl was only looking at me and I didn’t have an answer.

“Do you know what you are?” I asked. My mother didn’t hit me this time. Her quietly wrinkled face was intent. She wanted to know the answer too.

“Do you?” the dead girl echoed. I looked at my mother and my sister but both were watching the once dead thing come into its own uncertain life. Even though there were four of us, I knew I was all alone.

She didn’t speak for the rest of the day. That night, once we had put her to bed, I opened the window in my room and sat beside it, giving myself a deep chill from the night air. I could see a single star and I watched it until my eyes burned from strain.

“Did you mean to come back from the dead,” I said into the darkness. Minutes stretched by and the answer was so quiet I almost missed it.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her voice was still raspy but steadier.

“Do you remember who you were?” In the distance a train horn blared and I shivered through a gust of cold air.

“No,” she said. Then, “Maybe I wasn’t anyone yet.”

I turned to her, she was outlined by moonlight and wrapped tight in my bed, her face twitching with life. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe now I get to be.”

We spent the next day outside, under a sky too blue and atop grass, soft and green. The dead girl rolled about, reveling in everything I never thought to. She dug her fingers into the mud and smelled every flower, she baked her face in the sun till it was warm to the touch, she even laid still to let the bugs venture up her arms.

I’d never given much thought to the fact that I was alive. What was there to think about? I woke up and ate and moved and slept and I was alive. But now she was alive too, and for her it seemed different. More. I just watched her as the sun passed over us, and eventually everything dimmed. My mother came outside with plates of chicken and salad, and as I ate a dull pain in my jaw began, throbbing each time I chewed.

The dead girl hadn’t said much all day, only random words here and there, like “ant” and “canoe” and “serendipity”, as if she was making sure she could still speak. But once her plate was clean she stared at us, and I could tell she was gathering words in her mind.

“Are you my mother,” she asked.

My mother continued picking at her sparse plate. “How could I be?” she said.

I wanted to reach for my mother and hold the edge of her sleeve like a nervous child. After a few moments, my mother dropped her plate in the grass and rose onto her knees. She leaned forward and cupped the dead girl's face in her hands. My mother’s blue eyes glistened, wavering before she closed them.

“You’ve got the same face,” she swallowed hard before continuing, “How could I leave my child dead in the mud?” A tear trailed down my mother's cheek and the dead girl’s pale, shaky hand reached out and wiped it away. The two of them embraced.

I backed away as the muffled sound of crying became louder. I didn’t like to see people cry. In the kitchen I turned on the water to rinse my plate, but it wasn’t hot yet, so I waited.

Two blue jays chased each other through the trees just outside the kitchen window. They were vibrantly blue, blending into the sky, and they flew in circles, creating halos above the young trees my mother had planted months ago. I smiled when they landed on the same branch, inches from the window. They were so blue and beautiful, I leaned toward the glass.

My fingers released the plate, and it clattered into the sink. My hand was red and molted and burning. I hadn’t noticed the water becoming hot. I shut off the faucet and stuck my hand into the freezer, reaching for a bag of frozen peas. I moved back to the window, but only one blue jay was left. I pressed against the glass to see where the other had landed, and a fleck of blue caught my eye from below. Beneath the young trees, on the freshly mulched ground, lay one of the blue jays, unmoving. I tapped a nail on the window, but it didn’t move. Instead the blue jay still sitting on the branch flew away.

I slept turned away from the dead girl and the curtains remained closed. We breathed in unison, a gentle metronome that shattered any illusion of being alone in the darkness. I rubbed at the pain in my jaw, which had grown to a blistering sting, and cradled the burned hand against my chest. I wanted to sleep, to lay this whole day to rest, but every time I came close to dozing off, the dead girl would fidget. After a few motionless minutes, I thought she had finally fallen asleep, but instead she spoke.

“Wake up.”

“I’m not sleeping,” I said.

“I like the dark.”

“Okay.”

“Hmm,” she said it unvoiced—melodically. “It was dark before you found me.”

All the drowsiness drained from my body. “It was?”

“Yes. Dark like it is now. Suffocating. Inescapable. Everywhere.”

I turned around to face her, even though I wouldn’t be able to see her. “I can open the curtains. Or turn on the light.”

“No. It’s nice.” I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Do you miss it? Before we found you. Do you miss being…” I didn’t know how to say it.

“Dead?” she filled in.“In the ground?”

“Yes.”

“I might. This is nice too. It’s warm and there are people and I like seeing the sky.” Her breath hitched and she coughed. The noise was rattling and hollow. “But sometimes I’m tired and I remember before.” She hummed a few notes.

“We could visit it one day, where we found you,” I offered.

“That would be nice.” She reached out a searching hand and found my face. She patted my cheek and I winced, cupping the side of my face.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

“My jaw hurts,” I said. I ran a finger against my teeth and grimaced when I touched a back molar.

“Why,” she said.

I pushed on it again and my whole body shivered. “Tooth,” I said. I pushed again and the tooth gave, falling onto my tongue. I spit it into my hand and the dead girl felt around my palm until she found it.

“A tooth fell out,” I said. There was no blood in my mouth.

“Are you okay?”

I stuck the tooth under my pillow and shut my eyes tight. “Don’t tell mom,” I said, and forced myself to sleep.

By the time the week was over, I had lost three more teeth. I kept them all hidden in a small box beneath the bed and told no one. It was easy to lie to my mother. She spent her days roaming the house searching for projects, and any moment of reprieve she spent tending to the dead girl, who had entered a curious stage in her development. The dead girl spent her days wandering the house and staring at things for hours, climbing in cabinets and atop tables, all in the name of seeing more. I didn’t tell the dead girl about the other teeth either, and at night she didn’t ask.

The only person who noticed the wincing and the awkward way I chewed was my sister. She made comments about the hard food I threw away and watched me from behind door frames. She became my shadow.

So when the fourth tooth fell and I ran to put it beneath my bed with the others, she followed. I didn’t notice the second set of steps behind me on the stairs, or the creaking of my bedroom door as she nudged inside. I opened the box of rotted teeth and placed the newest addition among the others.

“Are those teeth?” she said. Her voice was choked. She had always been so quiet, even as a baby her cries were gentle.

I shut the box and pushed it under the blankets. “Why did you follow me?”

“Why are you hiding them?”

“Get out.”

Her lip quivered and tears welled in her eyes. She took a shaky step back, but retreated no further. “Why won’t you tell me?”

I couldn’t hide from the way she looked at me. I couldn’t put her in a box beneath my bed. A muscle hitched in my chest and I wanted to cry, too. “Because I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Can I see?” She took a hesitant step closer.

I nodded, tipping my head back and opening my mouth. She swallowed hard and inspected the empty sockets.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

She sat beside me on the bed and tucked her legs beneath her. She was small, like a child, but I think only I saw her that way. It's a symptom of growing up with someone—remembering them instead of seeing them.

“Is it getting better or worse?” she asked.

I pulled the box out from under the blanket and set it on the bed. “I think worse.”

“You should tell mom.”

“It’ll only make her scared, too.”

My sister reached for my hand and squeezed it tight. “I’m not scared,” she said.

A tear fell from my eye and I quickly wiped it away. “Good.”

“What will you do now?”

I lay back onto my bed, pushing my legs beneath the blankets. “I think I’ll rest a while.”

My sister stood up, taking the box of teeth and setting it on the nightstand. “Will you be okay?” she asked.
I smiled at her. “Will you be okay? Without me?”

She came close and pressed a feather light kiss to my forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she whispered before leaving me to sleep in the daylight.

I woke to an empty house. I couldn’t tell if I had slept for hours or days and everything was coated in cool blue light, making it look like dawn and dusk and twilight all at once. Down in the kitchen, I turned on the kettle. I made myself a cup of tea and searched for the blue jay in the window.

When I opened the cabinet, the dead girl fell out. I thought maybe she had died again the way her body flopped to the ground, but she was staring up at me, grinning. I thought that maybe it was her that was making me this way. Maybe this had all begun because we dug her up and brought her back. But I looked at her face which was my face and she looked at my face which was her face, and I couldn’t find it in myself to blame her or be angry at her or to even ignore her. What good was fault? What was the anger going to do?

I finished my tea and she lay there on the floor staring at the tiles.

“Do you want to go visit the place where we found you?” I asked.

It took her a moment but she rolled over and sat up. “I do.”

We got dressed in our clothes and brushed our hair and found shoes. It had been a while since I had been for a walk.

The air outside was damp and everything was dewy, but I didn’t remember it raining. The dead girl walked beside me, periodically grasping my hand and asking me if I remembered the way. I did.

We moved slowly through the green forest that had trees much older than the ones in my mother's garden and ivy that grew to its heart's content. I ran my hands along mossy patches and looked for slivers of blue between the tree branches that all seemed to be reaching for each other. The bugs were singing and the birds flew and chirped and nothing hid from us.

When we arrived at the place where we first found the dead girl, she became very quiet. She stared at the hole in the ground, which was not deep enough to be a grave but too deep to be anything but. She looked at it differently than how she looked at everything else. There was no awe or fascination, only memory heavy on her skin.

She reached for my hand and together we stepped closer. She lowered herself inside and I followed. We sat together, knee to knee, surrounded by dirt and sticks and rocks. She said nothing for a long time.

“I don’t know if this is right,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I thought it would be nice here, but all I can think about is being out there.” She pointed to the forest, and through it all, the direction of home.

From my pocket I pulled out my missing teeth. They were rotted and chipped and I held them out to her. She counted them in my palm twice then cradled my face in her hands.

“Do you think the sky has favorites?” I asked, “People it looks forward to seeing, people it gets extra blue for?”

The dead girl took the teeth from me and put them in her pocket. “I think the sky is the sky.”

“I’m not sure I’m one of those people, you know?” I said.

She laid a hand on my arm. “Let’s go home now,” she said. She stood but I didn’t move.

“Maybe that’s a good thing. That means it won’t miss me. Right?” I said it with a dying smile and peered up at her.

“Why?” she said.

“I’m going to stay here for a while, okay?”

The dead girl looked at me, and for the first time she looked sad. I wondered if she would cry. I had never seen her cry.

“It’s going to be dark, you know that, right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You won’t dream either.”

I laughed. “That’s okay.”

“But if you wake up,” the dead girl’s breath quickened as she said it, “if you wake up you’ll dream. Just like I did.”

I nodded and she threw the first pile of dirt onto me. I laid back and let my body melt itself into the earth. As the dirt piled up and my chest slowed its movement the girl poked her head over the edge.

“What’s my name?” she asked.

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head.

“You can have mine,” I told her, “Now you get to be someone.”
​
She smiled and threw the last of the dirt over me and everything was dark.  

---

​Sophia Bosma is a writer of fiction and fantasy based in Texas. Her work often centers themes of disability, identity, and grief, and she has been previously published in LookDeeper Zine. She enjoys experimenting with and exploring different forms and genres. She is currently pursuing an English degree and hopes to one day pull herself together long enough to write a book.