Silence Mandatory

I suppose it was about a week after he died that I lost my mind. Maybe it was the funeral that did it: I was the only one who'd come aside from his decrepit great-grandmother, an intimidating beast of a woman in a wheel chair who'd some how managed to out live her daughter and her grand-daughter, and now her great-grandson. Being in a morbidly beautiful cathedral for three hours with a woman at least five times your age can make you lose your mind, right?

The service was lovely, by the way, with all sorts of beautiful flowers clinging to the walls and covering his coffin. The flowers all came from numerous friends and relatives of his and mine and ours and all the flowers ended up in our barren apartment a week later.

Anyway, back to losing my mind. At nineteen not many people are thoroughly convinced that they've found their soulmate, correct? Well I was. I think Kent was. We'd never dated, but we'd been friends since my freshman year in high school (his sophomore year) and we'd both professed our love to one another and it was implied that we were a couple even if it was never announced. Why didn't we tie the knot? Why didn't we date or get married or have a family? Because he died, that's why.

I'd been sitting in our apartment sobbing my eyes out for three days after the funeral when he walked nonchalantly in from the kitchen with a sandwich and sat beside me. 'What cha cryin' for?' he asked through a full mouth of bread, bolagna and mayonaise.

It took me a minute to register that it was really him. His eyes were still their deep blue and his hair was still brown and wild...really the only difference in him was the unhealthy hue of blue that held his skin, the dark grit under his fingernails and the tiny rips in his lips where the stitches that mortitians put in corpse's lips had been torn out. That and he smelled faintly of decay and dirt.

'What are you doing here?' I asked him bluntly, standing up and backing to the other side of the room.

'I live here too you know.' Kent shrugged.

'No, just what are you doing here alive?' I demanded.

'Snicker-doodle, I'm not dead.' he assured me with a characteristic smile.

'I went to your funeral, yeah, you're dead. Why else would all these flowers be here?'

'Cookie, YOU died in that accident, not me. You were in the driver's seat, remember? That was the one the truck demolished.'

Yes, I remembered that the truck smashed the driver's side, but we'd switched sides at the gas station just before merging to Route 66, he'd been driving, not me.

'Kent, you're dead. Look at you, you're all blue and corpse-like.' I reasoned gently.

'No, I think you've got us mixed up.' Kent laughed.

'If I'm dead, then why aren't you freaked out? I'm standing in our aparment, aren't I?'

'Well, I'm pretty sure I've gone insane, so it's a given that you'd be here. To tell you the truth, I'm just glad to see you again.' He stood and embraced me. Nope, he wasn't a ghost, he was definatly a corpse, a whole, solid corpse. 'Wow, you're not a ghost after all! You're really a corpse!'

'I could say the same for you.' I decided then to give up and accept the fact that I was insane. I could live with it as long as Kent was with me.

Well it was then of course that I woke up in a hospital room staring at the blinding white ceiling. Kent's pale frightened face was there too, and he spoke frantically in words I couldn't understand.

to be continued...