Break Down

by Becca Wild

Alan Pope

“Look, I’m sorry to dig up your remains,” Gwen said to the corpse. “I didn’t mean to. I was drunk, and I realize now I should have left all this grass that has grown over your grave continue to grow and prosper. I’ve made an error. I’m sorry.”

Then she pulled the old “Look, I’m not perfect” line.

And then she threw in “Neither are you” to the rotting corpse.

Then there was a space in the night in which the two of them existed together, on the same plane, although each very changed, facing each other, not separated by ground and piles of soil for the first time in years since the grave was dug. Since he was put in the grave.

Covered.

A lot of people could have done it. Really. After four rosés and a local hard cider, anyone could find themselves digging up a grave, given the right shovel and proximity to the cemetery.

Anyone could have a face-off with a decaying body.

Gwen had just happened to do it tonight, to him, at this gravesite, the one behind the bar, where she had once told him that he was a secretive two-timer, the one where she told him good fucking luck with your next girlfriend, I just hope that she is not half as permissive as I was.

The shovel, surprisingly, was taller than her.

As she stood with soil on her hands and dead blobs of grass around her feet in pink flip-flops, Gwen realized that she would have to pay for her imperfect decision. There were the cemetery fees to consider of course, but there was also all that subterranean emotion that she now had to tend to, address.

Back when he was alive, he played her Bob Dylan songs on the tape player in his beat-up Subaru. They shelled out for to-go coffees and went on long day dates together. He even convinced her to skip work one time to see the new Hobbit movie that came out on a day that was snowing. They passed a joint back and forth in gloved hands in the parking lot white with salt and melting snow. Shehad felt alive.

Not long after, the Subaru developed this little sputter sound under the hood. Gwen told him to get it checked out, but who had the money for something like that?

She called him to ask him out for a drive. He texted back, “I don’t want to push it, u know?”

The sputter matured into a deep, hollow clank.

Then he got a girlfriend with a name of a flower and stopped smoking pot, stopped drinking coffee too. It had been the better choice for the guy, but more boring, let’s all admit it.

And it’s hard to put something back to bed once you’ve worked for years to keep it under wraps, and then find that you’ve undone all that work in a matter of minutes.

Now he looked right at her. He seemed to know something about physics and the afterlife that she didn’t. Skin covered in dirt. That same stupid band t-shirt. A toothpick in his stupid teeth.

“Look,” he said, coughing and picking dirt chunks out of his nose. “This is how it goes,” the corpse said, sitting up. “You have to tell me very frankly and clearly why you dug me up tonight,” and after a pause, decided, “Three reasons. You have to give me three reasons.” He leaned against the side of his exhumed grave, expectant.

“That,” said Gwen, snapping back to her senses and remembering his annoying sarcasm, “is an arbitrary number, and you know it.” She was calling him out on his corpse bluff. “You think that just because you’re like, from the underworld now, you get to call the shots. Well. You are wrong.” She stuck the shovel’s point into the ground declaratively: “I am the digger here. And you. Are from the ground.”

“BOO,” he answered, and Gwen lost her composure. The corpse had all sorts of new inconvenient features. He had crossed over, had probably seen some shit.

“Okay, okay. I take it back. You’re in charge. Look, I guess I just dug you up because I miss you, okay? I miss my friend. Is that enough for you?”

“That’s one. I need two more.” The corpse put his elbow on the earth outside his grave. He added, “You got any toothpicks?”

“No, I don’t have any toothpicks.” She checked her pockets anyway. “C’mon, what do I need two more reasons for?”

“DO IT!” he said, and bared his teeth, totally playing the dead card.

“Okay, okay. Reason two. I hate you with the flower girl. I mean, I like her, as a person, okay? I just hate that she’s who you chose next, after me. I mean, is that really who you wanted me to be all along? Is that what I was missing for you?”

She watched his eye twitch as if his brain wasn’t firing perfectly. Maybe he is unable to consider present-time circumstances, Gwen considered. Maybe what is underground is only ever composed of the past.

“Three,” the corpse demanded, rotating the toothpick in his mouth.

“Okay.” Gwen’s head buzzed from that last gulp of rosé. She’d downed it too fast and now she felt a headache starting. She was coming up dry.

“You… you remember that time when you bought that used saxophone on Amazon but you didn’t have a credit card, so you used my account?” she spit out. “Well, now whenever I order shit online, it always asks me what mailing address I want to use, and yours is still listed on there, okay?” Her reasoning seemed weaker and weaker as it came out of her mouth. She slouched against the shovel. She knew how it all sounded.

“That,” said the corpse, “is the stupidest reason I have ever heard to dig up someone from the dead.” He sighed and leaned back, bored. If corpses had phones, he would have checked his.

Gwen scrambled. “Look, I never meant to sabotage you,” she tried. “If you can believe it, I do care for you.”

He was looking around the graveyard as if he had somewhere better to be.

She covered her bases. “I’m not asking you out again or anything like that,” she said. “I just didn’t want to feel like there was a grudge between us of any kind.”

“You know, like animosity.” She realized that the corpse probably didn’t know the word ‘animosity,’ so she replaced it with ‘ill-will.’ On the third time around, she just said ‘bad feelings.’

This guy is not going anywhere, she thought.

“If you can believe it, I want what’s best for you,” she told him. “I’ve left you alone, until now, don’t you see?” And then more weakly: “Can we just find some common ground?”

He said something, but Gwen couldn’t quite make out the details. His limbs flopped to his sides, and he wobbled like he forgot how to work his knees. His center of gravity was on its way back down.

“Oh god,” she scrambled to catch him but failed. She put her hands on his shoulders and said, “I’m coming in with you.” She lowered herself into the grave. This was all so unrehearsed. She stumbled to help his body make its way down. She felt like she was helping him into a bed. She almost went to help him remove his shoes, his t-shirt, but realized this was a ridiculous instinct.

I suck at this, she thought, at all of this. She hoisted herself back out onto the earth with no small effort. She shoveled chunks of dirt back into the grave, kept going until it was full.

When she finished, the top of the grave looked raw, different from how she left it. She kicked the dirt around a little to fix it until she gave up on the project.

“Um, bye?” she said to the ground.

The exhumation had been a total flop. She ended the thing by throwing what dirt she could throw back in the ground without getting too much more on herself.

When she got home, her one-bedroom spun around her in its budget decor. She undid the buttons of her restrictive jeans and kicked them off in a disorganized way. Her eyes zoomed around the room, finally locating her laptop, which she picked up and pulled into bed with her. She logged onto Amazon and stumbled through pictures of saxophones, then some random band t-shirts, and then finally found herself in the garden section, looking at different kinds of seeds.

Grasses, she selected, tall grasses, partial shade, and she sent them to him, to where he used to live.

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Becca Wild holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Huffington Post, Chronogram Magazine, Maudlin House, Lady Liberty Lit, Awosting Alchemy, and more. Her story “Shoulder Span” received a nomination for Sundress Best of the Net. She is a member of the Kingston Writers’ Studio in Kingston, New York.