by Neil Gaiman
But under the sweet there was something else—when a breeze sneaked through and flickered the candles I thought I could smell it—like when we got back from vacation that summer and the freezer broke down while we were away. Mom made Dad move us to a motel for awhile. Something like that, but it was having a hard time digging itself out of all that sweetness.
“Candles cost a fortune,” Jesse said. “All the money in my dad’s wallet plus the coins my mom kept in a fruit jar. She didn’t even think I knew about that. But they look pretty neat, huh?”
I took a step into the room and looked at his dad’s mouth. Then his mom’s mouth. They hung open like they were about to swallow a fly or sing or something. I almost laughed again, but I couldn’t. Their mouths looked a little like my dad’s mouth, the way he lets it hang open when he falls asleep on the couch watching TV. But different. Their mouths were soft and loose, their lips dark, all dry and cracked, but even though they were holding their mouths open so long no saliva came dripping out. And there was gray and blue under their eyes. There were dark blotches on Jesse’s mom’s face. They were so still, like they were playing a game on me. Without even thinking about it I pushed on his dad’s leg with my foot. It was like pushing against a board. His dad rocked a little, but he was so tight his big arms didn’t even wiggle. Jesse always said his old man was “too tight.” I really did start to laugh, thinking about that, but it was like my breath exploded instead. I didn’t even know I had been holding it. “Jesus…” I could feel my chest shake all by itself.
Jesse looked at me almost like he was surprised, like I’d done something wrong. “I told you, didn’t I? Don’t be a baby.” He sat down on the floor and started playing with his dad’s leg, pushing on it and trying to lift up the knee. “Last night they both started getting stiff. It really happens, you know? It’s not just something in the movies. You know why it happens, John?” He looked up at me, but he was still poking the leg with his fist, like he was trying to make his dad do something, slap him or something. Any second I figured his dad would reach over and grab Jesse by the hair and pull him down onto the floor beside them.
I shook my head. I was thinking no no no, but I couldn’t quite get that out. Jesse hit his dad on the thigh hard as he could. It sounded like an overstuffed leather chair. It didn’t give at all. “Hell, I don’t know either. Maybe it’s the body fighting off being dead, even after you’re dead, you know? It gets all mad and stiff on you.” He laughed but it didn’t sound much like Jesse’s laugh. “I guess it don’t know it’s dead. It don’t know shit once the brain is dead. But if I was going to die I guess I’d fight real hard.” Jesse looked at his mom and dad and made a twisted face like he was smelling them for the first time. “Bunch of pussies…”
He grabbed the arm his dad had folded against his chest and tried to pull it away. His dad held on but then the arm bent a little. The fat shoulders shook when Jesse let go and his dad fell back. The head hit the pillow and left a greasy red smear.
“The old man here started loosening up top a few hours ago, in the same order he got stiff in.” Jesse reached over and pinched his dad’s left cheek.
“Christ, Jesse!” I ran back into the hall and fell on the floor. I could hardly breathe. Then I started crying, really bawling, and I could breathe again.
After awhile I could feel Jesse patting me on the back. “You never saw dead people before, huh, Johnny?”
I just shook my head. “I’m s-sorry, Jesse. I’m s-so sorry.” “They were old,” he said. “It’s okay. Really.”
I looked up at him. I didn’t understand. It felt like he wasn’t even speaking English. But he just looked at me, then looked back into his parents’ bedroom, and didn’t say anything more. Finally I knew I had to say something. “How did it happen?”
He looked at me like I was being the one hard to understand. “I told you. They were old.”
I thought about the red smear his dad’s head made on the pillow, but I couldn’t get myself to understand it. “But, Jesse…at the same time?”
He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you, John? My dad died first. I guess that made my mom so sad she died a few minutes later. You’ve heard of that. First one old person dies, then the person they’re married to dies just a short time after?”
“Yeah…” “Their hearts just stopped beating.” I looked up at him. I could feel my own heart vibrating in my chest, so hard it hurt my ribs. “I put them together like that. They were my parents. I figured they’d like that.”
He had that right, I guess. After all, they were his parents. Maybe he didn’t always get along with them, but they were his parents. He could look at them after they were dead.
I made myself look at them. It was a lot easier the second time. A whole lot easier. I felt a little funny about that. Even without his dad’s blood on the pillow they were a lot different from sleeping people. There was just no movement at all, and hardly any color but the blue, and they both looked cool, but not a damp kind of cool because they looked so dry, and their eyelids weren’t shut all the way, and you could see a little sliver of white where the lids weren’t all the way closed. I made myself get as close to their eyes as I could, maybe to make sure one final time they weren’t pretending. The sliver of white was dull, like on a fish. Like something thick and milky had grown over their eyes. They looked like dummies some department store had thrown out in the garbage. There wasn’t anything alive about them at all.
“When did they die?”
Jesse was looking at them, too. Closely, like they were the strangest things anyone had ever seen. “It’s been at least a day, I guess. Almost two.”
Jesse said we shouldn’t call the police just yet. They were his parents, weren’t they? Didn’t he have the right to be with them for awhile? I couldn’t argue with that. I guessed Jesse had all kinds of rights when it was his parents. But it still felt weird, him being with their dead bodies almost two whole days. I helped him light some more candles when he said the air wasn’t sweet enough anymore. I felt a little better helping him do that, like we were having a funeral for them. All those sweet-smelling candles and incense felt real religious. Then I felt bad about thinking he was being weird earlier, like I was being prejudiced or something. But it was there just the same. I quit looking at his mom and dad, except when Jesse told me to. And after a couple of hours of me just standing out in the hallway, or fussing with the candles, trying not to look at them, Jesse started insisting.
“You gotta look at them, John.” “I did. You saw me. I looked at them.” “No, I mean really look at them. You haven’t seen everything there is to see.” I looked at him instead. Real hard. I could hardly believe he was saying this. “Why? I’m sorry they’re dead. But why do I have to look at them?”
“Because I want you to.” “Jesse…” “…and besides, you should know about these things. Your mom and dad don’t want you to know about things like this but I guess it’s about the most important thing to know about there is. Everybody gets scared of dying, and just about everybody is scared of the dead. You remember that movie Zombie we rented? That’s what it was all about. Now we’ve got two dead bodies here. You’re my friend, and I want to help you out. I want to share something with you.”
“Christ, Jesse. They’re your parents.” “What, you think I don’t know that? Who else should I learn about this stuff from anyway? If they were still alive, they’d be supposed to teach me. What’s wrong with it? And don’t just tell me because it’s ‘weird.’ People say something’s weird because it makes them nervous. Just because it bothers them they don’t want you to do it. So what do we care, anyway? Nobody else is gonna know about this.”
Jesse could argue better than anybody, and I never knew what to think about anything for sure. Before I knew it he had me back in the bedroom, leaning over the bodies. It was a little better—I guess I was getting used to them. At least I didn’t feel ready to throw up like I did a while ago. That surprised me. It surprised me even m
ore when he took my hand and put it on his mom’s—his dead mom’s—arm, and I didn’t jerk it away.
“Jesus…” I guess I’d expected it to be still stiff, but it had gotten soft again, as soft as anything I’d ever felt, like I could just dig my fingers into her arm like butter. It was cool, but not what I expected. And dry.
“See the spots?” Jesse said behind me. “Like somebody’s been painting her.
Like for one of those freak shows. Oh, she’d hate it if she knew. She’d think she looked like a whore!”
I saw them all right. Patches of blue-green low down on his dad’s belly. Before I could stop him he raised his mom’s skirt and showed me that the marks on her were worse: more of the blue-green and little patches of greenish red, all of it swimming together around her big white panties. I was embarrassed, but I kept staring. That’s the way I’d always imagined seeing my first panties on a woman: when she was asleep or—to tell the truth—when she was dead. I used to dream about dead women in their panties and bras, dead women naked with their parts hanging out, and I’d felt ashamed about it, but here it was happening for the real and for some reason I was having a hard time feeling too ashamed. I hadn’t done it; I hadn’t killed her.
“Look,” he said. I followed his hand as it moved up his mother’s belly. I tensed as he pulled her dress up further, back over her head so that I couldn’t see her mouth anymore, her mouth hanging open like she was screaming, but no sound coming out. “I know you always wanted to see one of these up close. Admit it, John.” His hand rested on the right cup of her bra. Now I felt real bad, and ashamed, like I had helped him kill her. Her white, loose skin spilled out of the top and bottom of the cup like big gobs of dough. With a jerk of his hand Jesse pulled his mother’s bra off. The skin was loose and it all had swollen so much it was beginning to tear. I knew it was going to break like an old fruit any second. “She’s gotten bigger since the thing happened,” he said. I started to choke. “Come on, John. You always wanted to see this stuff. You wanted to see it, and you wanted to see it dead.”
I turned away and walked back into the hall when he started to laugh. His mom was an it now. His dad was a thing. But Jesse knew me so well. He knew about the dreams and he knew what would get to me, what I always thought about, even though I’d never told him. It made me wonder if all guys my age think about being dead that way, wanting to see it and touch it, wanting something real like that, even though it was so awful. I used to dream about finding my own parents dead, and what they would look like, but never once did I imagine I would do that to them. Not like Jesse. I knew now what Jesse had done to his parents. No question about that anymore. But I was all mixed up about what I felt about it. Because, even though it was awful, I still wanted to look, and touch. Wasn’t that almost as bad?
“Here.” Jesse grabbed my arm and turned me around. He led me back over to his mother’s body. “You don’t have to look. You can close your eyes. Let me just take your hand.” But I wanted to look. He took me over to her side. There was a big blister there, full of stuff. Jesse put my hand on it. “Feel weird, huh?” He didn’t look crazy; he looked like some kind of young scientist or something from some dumb TV show. I nodded. “Hey, look at her mouth!” I did. In her big loose mouth I could see pieces of food that had come up. A little dark bug crawled up out of her hair. This is what it’s like, what it’s really like, I thought. I thought about those rock stars I used to like all made up like they were dead, those horror movies I used to watch with Jesse, and all those stoner kids I used to know getting high every chance they had and telling me it don’t matter anyway and everything was just a drag with their eyes half shut and their mouths hanging open and their skin getting whiter every day. All of them, they don’t know shit about it, I thought. This is what it’s really like.
Jesse left me by his mom and started going to the candles one at a time, snuffing them out. A filmy gray smoke started to fill the bedroom. I could already smell the mix of sweet and sharp smells starting to go away, and underneath that the other truly awful smell creeping in.
Jesse turned to me while the last few candles were still lit. That bad smell was almost all over me now, but I just sat there, holding my breath and waiting for it. He almost grinned but didn’t quite make it. “I guess you’re ready to take a hit off all this now,” he said. I just stared at him. And then I let my clean breath go.
And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one.
We took off from his house with the one bike and Jesse’s pack but we had to walk most of the time because Jesse figured we’d better go cross-country, over the fences and through the trees where nobody could see us. He didn’t think they’d find the bodies anytime soon but my parents would report me missing after awhile. It was hell getting the bike through all that stuff but Jesse said we might need it later so we best take it. The scariest part was when we had to cross a couple of creeks and wading through water up over my belt carrying that bike made me sure I was going to drown. But I thought maybe I even deserved it for what I’d seen, what I’d done, and what I didn’t do. I thought about what a body must look like after it drowned—I’d heard they swole up something awful, and I thought about Jesse showing off my body after I’d died, letting people poke it and smell it, and then I didn’t want to die anymore.
Once Jesse suggested that maybe we should build a raft and float downriver like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I’d read the two books and he’d seen one of the movies. I thought it was a great idea but then we couldn’t figure out how to do it. Jesse bitched about how they don’t teach you important stuff like that in school, and used to, dads taught you stuff like raft-building but they didn’t anymore. He said his dad should have taught him stuff like that but he was always too busy.
“Probably,” I said, watching Jesse closer all the time because he seemed to be getting frustrated with everything.
I thought a lot about Tom and Huck that first day and how they came back into town just in time to see their own funeral. I wondered if every kid dreamed about doing that. I wondered if my parents found out about what I did in Jesse’s house what they would say about me at my funeral.
We slept the first night under the trees. Or tried to. Jesse walked around a lot in the dark and I couldn’t sleep much from watching him. The next morning he was nervous and agitated and first thing he did he found an old dog and beat it over the head with a hammer. I didn’t know he had the hammer but it was in his pack and I pretty much guessed what he’d used it for before. He didn’t even tell me he was going to do it, he just saw the dog and as soon as he saw it he did it. We both stood there and looked at the body and touched it and kicked it and I didn’t feel a damn thing and I don’t think Jesse did either because he was still real nervous.
Later that morning the farmer picked us up in his truck. “Going far?” he asked us from the window and I wanted to tell him to keep driving mister but I didn’t. He was old and had a nice face and was probably somebody’s father and some kid’s grandfather but I couldn’t say a thing with Jesse standing there.
“Meadville,” Jesse said, smiling. I’d seen that fakey smile on Jesse’s face before, when he talked to adults, when he talked to his own parents. “We’re gonna help out on my uncle’s farm.” Jesse smiled and smiled and my throat and my chest and my head started filling up with that awful smell again. The old man looked at me and all I could do was look at him and nod. He let Jesse into the cab of the truck and told me I’d better ride with my bike in the back. The old man smiled at me a real smile, like I was a good boy.
The breeze was cool in the back of the truck and the bed rocked so on the gravelly side road we were on I started falling asleep, but every time I was getting ready to conk out we’d hit a bump or something and my head would snap up. But I still think I must have slept a little because somewhere in there I started to dream. I dreamed that I was riding along in the back of a pickup truck my grandfather was driving. He’d been singing the whole way and
I’d been enjoying his singing but then it wasn’t singing anymore it was screaming and a monster was in the front seat with him, Death was in the front seat with him, beating him over the head with a hammer. Then the truck jerked to a stop and I looked through the cab window where Death was hammering the brains out of my grandfather and coating the glass with gray and brown and red. My grandfather scratched at the glass like I should do something but I couldn’t because it was just a dream. Then Death turned to me and grinned while he was still swinging the hammer and fighting with my grandfather and it was my face grinning and speckled with brains and blood.
I turned around to try to get out of the dream, to watch the trees whizz by while the truck was rocking me to sleep, but the land was dark and the trees were tall bodies all swollen in their dying and their heavy heads hanging down and their loose mouths falling open. And the wind through the trees was the breath of the dead—that awful smell I thought we’d left back at Jesse’s house.
Later I kissed my grandfather goodbye and helped Jesse bury him under one of those tall trees that smelled so bad.
And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one. He grins and says he’s lost the smell. But I can smell it all the time—I smell, taste, and breathe that smell.
Outside Meadville Jesse washed up and stole a shirt and pants off a clothesline. From there we took turns walking and riding the bike to a mall where Jesse did some panhandling. We used the money to buy shakes and burgers. While we were eating Jesse said that panhandling wasn’t wrong if you had to do it to get something to eat. I couldn’t watch Jesse eat—the food kept coming up out of his mouth. My two burgers smelled so bad I tried to hold my breath while I ate them but that made me choke. But I still ate them. I was hungry.
We walked around the mall for a long time. Other people did the same thing, staring, but never buying anything. It reminded me of one of those zombie pictures. I tried not to touch anybody because they smelled so bad and they held their mouths open so that you could see all their teeth.