Sunny Sweet is So Dead Meat

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  I had only been inside a big graveyard like this once. It was back when I was about eight and Sunny was still in a stroller. My mom and dad took us to Gettysburg, where there had been a big battle during the Civil War. I don’t remember that much about it, but just that my dad and mom held hands during the movie we watched before we walked in the graveyard across the street from the park’s center. It was cozy and dark in the theater, and I leaned against my dad’s arm. I can still smell the warm cotton of his shirt. I totally belonged in that place and that time. The thing is, when you belong, you don’t know that you belong. You only know that you once belonged when you don’t belong anymore. Standing outside the archway of the Fairlawn Cemetery, I didn’t feel like I belonged at all. The janitor’s face popped into my head, along with his words you don’t belong here. I snapped at my little sister to get him out of my mind. “Hurry up, Sunny.”

  We walked into the graveyard and started down one of the little roads.

  “Wait!” Sunny called. “Shouldn’t we take one of those maps with us?” She pointed at a little shedlike structure that said INFORMATION on it. On the outside of the shed there were a few rows of wooden shelves containing maps.

  “No,” I said, even though I stinkin’ knew that this was a mistake. I just didn’t want her to be right … again. A person can get pretty tired of her six-year-old little sister always knowing more than her. “We’re going to walk straight across the graveyard to the hospital.”

  “But the roads look like they go in loops,” she said, looking up ahead of us.

  “I said we don’t need it. We’re not going to take the roads. We’re going to walk straight across the grass.”

  “On people’s graves?” she asked.

  “They’re dead, Sunny. They won’t care.”

  She glanced one last time at the rack of maps and then back at me. But she didn’t move.

  “You can carry around a gross pail of lar-veee, but you’re all freaked out about walking over a few graves?”

  I turned back and walked out onto the graves. I was completely freaked out, but I pretended that I was simply walking in a park and not over the top of dead people. I really wished I had both sneakers on, though. The grass felt so spongy. “Come on,” I said. “It will be like a game. We have to walk in a diagonal line through the graveyard to the gate across from the hospital, no matter what. We can call it the Diagonal Line Game.”

  “Is the cemetery in the shape of a polygon?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, if it isn’t a polygon then we can’t walk a formal diagonal line because a diagonal line is a line joining two points of a polygon.”

  I stopped walking and turned around. “I’m going to poly-gong you right on your head,” I told her.

  She thought for a second and then said, “I know, Masha, we can walk an informal diagonal line. Informally, any sloping line can be called diagonal.”

  “Okay, Sunny, let’s just keep walking. All I want is to be home right now.”

  She shook her head yes, the giant rain hat bobbing up and down on her head. I turned and started back over the graves.

  “Masha,” she said, following behind me. “Can we can call it the Informal Diagonal Line Game? You know, so it’s named correctly?”

  “Sunny Sweet, we are in the middle of a graveyard, and if you don’t be quiet, I’m going to start digging your grave right this minute.”

  “Okay, Masha, no problem,” she said. “We can call the game your name. I mean, lots of things are misnamed. Did you know that the word ‘alligator’ is a misspelling of the Spanish words ‘el lagarto’ for ‘the lizard’? And take the Bufo marinus toad. That toad can live just about anywhere except in a marine environment!” She snorted. “Get it? A marinus toad that can’t swim.”

  “Sunny,” I growled. “Alice is waiting for us. So stop talking and start walking.”

  We trudged off across the graves. I was careful not to step directly on the gravestones that were laid flat in the grass. Weirdly, the graveyard was kind of a pretty place. The headstones were all different sizes. Some were very pointy and high, like the Washington Monument, and others were like little houses with doors and tiny front lawns surrounded by miniature iron fences. The grass was bright green, like it had been fed a ton of lawn food. And there were flowers and colorful wreaths in front of many of the gravestones. Even the trees were pretty. They all looked like trees out of a little kid’s drawing. They had solid, straight trunks with a rounded top of leaves like a perfect piece of broccoli. But the best part about this place was that being covered in red splotches and pottery dust was no big deal to dead people. I could forget about Sunny’s crazy experiment and just think about how I would get to say hi to Alice, and then we’d be home, home, home … and eating Mrs. Song’s lip-smacking dumplings, and this whole day would soon be washed off in a really, really long shower.

  Sunny walked beside me, swinging her bucket and humming. I tried not to think about the eggs in the hamburger, but then I couldn’t get them out of my head. “So, Sunny, how do flies lay their eggs in dead bodies if they’re buried in the ground?”

  “They don’t,” she chirped. “It used to be that scientists thought that things could come alive out of dead stuff like hamburgers or dog poop. They called it spontaneous generation. They even thought that mice could grow out of dirty underwear mixed with wheat.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes way.” She giggled. “Of course live things can’t pop out of dirty underwear, except for maybe Freddie Winniger’s underwear.”

  We laughed. Freddie Winniger was this kid in Sunny’s class who was always teasing her. He called her silly names like Stormy and Rainy. But he also called her The Freak. Back in our old school, because my dad was principal, everybody knew Sunny and nobody teased her. She was even allowed to hang out in Dad’s office when she got bored in class. In our new school, she was stuck in the classroom with Freddie. Once when I saw Freddie burp in Sunny’s face on her way out of school, I ran over and told him that he had better leave Sunny alone. He shouted that he didn’t have to listen to me. I remember Sunny nodding her head and saying, “He’s right.” I wanted to bop her in the head. I knew he was right, but maybe he didn’t know he was right … and that was the whole point. Later, when Sunny wasn’t watching, I found Freddie on the playground and told him that I was really a ghost and that if he didn’t leave Sunny alone I was going to show up one night in his room and pull him under the bed and eat him. He called me a liar, but I could tell that he was spooked. Every time I saw him in the halls I tried to look like I was floating. He left Sunny alone after that.

  “So if the flies can’t lay their eggs in a buried body, how do maggots get into dead bodies?” I asked.

  “I guess a fly can lay eggs in your dead body if you die and nobody finds you right away. But if you die and they bury you immediately, flies don’t get to you. Instead, there are a lot of other things under there that will munch on you.”

  “Ugh, Sunny, don’t tell me any more.”

  “Anyway,” she continued, “it’s mostly tiny little things called bacteria that eat you after you’re dead, and then some insects that are already down there, like beetles and stuff.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” I couldn’t stand the thought of a thousand beetles chewing on me.

  We headed up a small hill past another group of gravestones. They looked a lot like the last group we passed by. I read the names on the stones. They even sounded like the names on the last stones. As I looked around, all of a sudden the pretty green grass and perfect trees all seemed a little too pretty and green and a little too perfect. I walked faster up to the top of the hill.

  Once we got to the top, I thought for sure we’d at least see the hospital, or maybe hear cars or something. But it was quiet, and all I saw were more creepy trees. “Let me borrow those binoculars, Sunny.”

  “What binoculars?”

  “The ones you were spying on me with bac
k at the school.”

  “Whoops, I left them in the tree.”

  Great. I started off down the hill toward a little forest of trees because I could see another tiny hill up ahead. I was really hoping that from the top of that hill we’d see the hospital.

  “This is not diagonal,” Sunny said.

  “Yes, it is,” I told her.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Okay, it’s not,” I snapped.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said.

  “Yes, I do,” I told her.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Okay, I don’t,” I said. “But just come on. Maybe we’ll see the hospital at the top of the next hill.”

  But we didn’t.

  Sunny stared at me. I hated when I could see so much of the white in her eyes.

  “I know. I’ll just use the map on my phone.” I turned on the GPS. We immediately popped up as a tiny blue dot in the middle of a large, strangely shaped patch of green on the map—the cemetery. And even though we had passed over tiny roads with names like “Fir Avenue,” “Snowdrop Place,” and “Magnolia Street,” none of these tiny roads were showing up in the green patch on my map.

  “We should have taken a map from the front gate,” Sunny said.

  “We’re fine,” I said, although I wasn’t so sure.

  “Should we call Mommy?”

  “No, Sunny. Just let me think.”

  Even though I would do just about anything to be home right now, I didn’t want to call my mom. I wanted her to be able to finish her painting class, and I guess I wanted her to know that I could do this … take care of Sunny and myself. But could I? The sun was hot, and my T-shirt was sticking to my back. When I thought about being here when the sun started to go down, tiny belly butterflies zoomed around in my stomach.

  “I know!” I shouted, a little too loud. “All we have to do is start walking and watch the blue dot move on the map. I can see the hospital and I can see us, I just don’t know which way to walk. Come on.”

  I started down the hill and under a bunch of perfect broccoli trees, keeping my eye on the slowly moving blue dot. I watched us moving too far left from the hospital. “This way,” I said to Sunny, shifting to the right.

  “Masha, wait.”

  “No, let’s go,” I said. I tried to move faster so I could tell exactly which way the blue dot was going.

  “But, Masha!”

  “Come on,” I said, tripping over a low little fence. “It’s this way.”

  QUACK … QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

  I fumbled my phone, and just as I got a good grip on it, the green grass beneath me disappeared and everything went black.

  Six Feet Under

  I stumbled about on my knees. The ground was soft under my hands. From somewhere, Sunny was calling my name, but I couldn’t see anything. All around me was darkness.

  QUACK … QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

  My phone … it glowed from a foot away. I reached for it, and my hand sunk into something wet. I picked up my phone. Yuck, mud. Where the heck was I?

  QUACK … QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

  Something caught my eye. There was light over my head. I stared up at the large rectangle of sky hanging a few feet above me, confused.

  QUACK … QUACK … My phone finally stopped ringing.

  Then I saw Sunny staring down at me. And I understood.

  “Sunny!”

  “Masha!”

  My heart was pounding right through my chest, but the sound of Sunny’s scared voice and her giant blue eyes staring down at me kept me from screaming at the top of my lungs.

  “Sunny, listen,” I gulped out in a quiet, steady way … even though I completely wanted to jump right out of my skin. “I’m fine. I fell in a grave, that’s all.” The word “grave” just about stole all the air from my lungs—faster than a vampire could suck your blood.

  “Really?” she sobbed.

  “Totally,” I said. “It’s not like there is a dead body down here or something.” I looked around just to be sure, and my knees actually knocked together because I was that scared. I was stuck in a dark, muddy hole alone. But there was no dead body.

  “It would be in a coffin if there were a dead body down there.” Sunny sniffed. “Are you standing on a coffin?”

  My heart pounded even harder in my ears just thinking about standing on a coffin. “I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” I squeaked. “It feels soft and muddy down here.”

  “Probably the hole is empty and they aren’t going to bury the person until another day. Otherwise,” she added, “they would have pushed all the dirt back in, right?”

  “Right, right, of course,” I said, happy for the first time in my life to admit that Sunny knew everything.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if there is one down there or not, Masha. It’s not like dead bodies can hurt you. Zombies aren’t real.”

  What little hair I had stood straight off my head at the thought of a zombie hand sticking out of the mud and grabbing my ankle. I stretched toward Sunny with one hand, and she reached down. Our fingers touched, and I squeezed her tiny fingertips. They felt cold. I stretched up a little farther, and we grabbed hands. “Can you pull me up?”

  Sunny pulled, and I tried to stick my toes into the dirt of the side of the hole and climb out. But my cast dragged me down, and I could feel myself pulling Sunny in with me. I let go. I was stuck.

  “If only we wrapped our dead and placed them up in trees like early tribes did in Australia and Siberia,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be in this hole right now.”

  “But then we would have been walking under all the dead bodies in the trees today,” I pointed out.

  “Probably not,” she said. “We would just have been walking on top of the bones, which would have fallen from the trees. Vultures and other scavengers would have eaten all the flesh.”

  “Sunny, please don’t say words like ‘flesh’ right now.” She always had to take things too far. “Listen,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Go look around for a branch or something. Anything I can use to stand on or to climb out of here.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Wait,” I told her. “Don’t go more than thirty feet away from this spot.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because I said so,” I told her, sounding very much like my mother.

  “Okay, Masha.”

  Sunny vanished from the rectangle of light above my head, and I coughed to clear the clogged-up feeling in my throat. Pictures of forests filled with dead bodies hanging from trees floated about in my mind. I shifted to the very center of the hole to get away from the scary walls of dirt around me. Both my sneaker and my sock were each an inch deep in mud. And just because I had no better idea, I closed my eyes and clicked my muddy heels together and whispered the words, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no pla—”

  I thought I heard something snap. My eyes sprang open, and my head swiveled around on my neck, taking in every nook and cranny of my hole, searching for movement. I saw none. But this didn’t stop me from imagining the zombie’s red fleshy arm reaching up from below my feet and pulling me deep into the mud, or picturing hundreds and thousands of beetles, with their ink-black shells and long pinching heads, crawling out from the four dirt walls surrounding me.

  QUACK … QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

  I leaped in fear and let go of my phone. It hit the floor of the grave with a wet thud.

  In Too Deep

  “Where are you?” shouted a voice.

  “Alice?” My phone was slimy with mud. I wiped it off on my hat.

  “I waited forever!” She sounded upset.

  “I need help,” I whispered.

  “I need help,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said I need help,” Alice repeated.

  “I just said that.”

  “Said w
hat?” she asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” she asked. “I called, and well, don’t get mad,” she said.

  “Of course I won’t. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the graveyard,” she answered. “And I’ve been out here all alone waiting on the main road for you guys for forever, and I’m freaking out. Where are you?”

  “Alice,” I yelped. “Alice, I’m so happy you’re here. Sunny and I had an accident.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Hold on,” I told her. “Sunny!” I shouted. “Sunny, come back.”

  The brim of my mother’s rain hat popped over the hole.

  “Stay right here,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Alice is here.”

  “In the graveyard?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In her wheelchair?”

  “I guess so … Alice, where are you?”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I fell in a grave.”

  There was silence.

  “Alice?”

  “You what?”

  “I fell into a grave.”

  “How could that happen?”

  “I don’t know, I was watching the blue dot, and …”

  “What blue dot?”

  “On my phone. Never mind, where are you?”

  “I’m on Hazel Lane,” she said.

  “Um,” I said.

  “We should have taken a map at the gate,” Sunny said.

  “Okay,” I shouted up at her. “You’re right. You are always right! I should have taken the stupid map.”

  “You don’t have a map of the cemetery?” Alice asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “But why not?” Alice asked. “They have millions of them at all the gates and you can’t …”

  “Alice, I do not have a map of the cemetery,” I snapped. And then to Sunny I said, “Go run to the top of that hill we just came down and flap your arms around. Maybe Alice will be able to see you.”

  Sunny took off.

  “Really, that’s your plan?” Alice said.