Chapter 1- Part 1
I think I’m dead but since I’ve never been dead before I could be wrong. Oooh, I wonder if I’m a ghost. I haven't felt the urge to go "wooo wooo" or to haunt anyone yet but maybe that starts later. All I know is, I'm sitting in this chair in my dining room and my body is on the floor in the kitchen.
My boyfriend and I had a fight but I can’t remember what it was about. That part is all fuzzy, like it happened a long time ago. I remember him leaving and then going to look for some cookies I’d hidden in the kitchen. I got on a chair but needed more height so I put some magazines on the chair and then next thing I knew, splat.
Once in a fit of housekeeping rage, I hid a box of cookies above the refrigerator for emergencies. I did a pretty good job of hiding them too because they were still there. In my opinion, any emergency qualifies as a cookie emergency and these cookies were chocolate covered mint cookies! I’d put them inside the dusty fondue pot
I bought at a yard sale because Robert hates fondue. (That’s why they were in the pot, not why I bought it in the first place. That was just a bonus.) I knew he’d never look there. Another time I hid some See’s candies I got for Christmas in the freezer in a Tupperware labeled ‘Steamed Broccoli.” I dated it a month older than it was. He never suspected.
These cookies were saying, “Rachel, Rachel, find me and eat me. You'll feel so much better.” I knew they were right. So I got a chair and stood on it but it wasn't high enough. I wonder how I got the stupid cookies up there in the first place. So I stacked some magazines on the chair to make it higher. Big mistake. Children don't try this at home. It took a lot of magazines to be high enough to reach the top of the fridge. Do you have any idea how slippery magazines are? They shifted and I fell. I don’t know what happened after that. It’s kind of fuzzy. I know I popped right out of my body when I hit the floor. It was like opening a bottle of Champaign. Pop! But the next thing I knew sitting in this chair - a ghost.
When I popped out, there was a strange sensation like there wasn’t any time. You know how sometimes you feel like you lose a few minutes and you can’t remember how you got where you were? It was like that only more intense. I popped out and there were pieces of me scattered around. I don’t mean like arms and legs but things like memories and dreams. They were flying around and then sort of put themselves back together again when I was in the chair. It would be kind of a drag if I were melded onto this chair for eternity. I wonder if that’s why ghosts haunt, maybe they’re superglued to something and can’t leave. I’d get pissed at that too.
I've always been afraid of death. Not just dying but even being near someone who was dead. I’ve never even been to a funeral because in my family they usually involved an uncle who had died! My father had four brothers; two of them thought they’d try extreme sports so they’d be different from the other two who never did anything. The very first time my Uncle Fred went bungee jumping he forgot to hook the other of end of the cord to anything. That was his entire ‘extreme sport’ experience. I thought it was pretty extreme. My mom thought I didn’t go to his funeral because I was too sad but it was really because of death cooties. OK, I’ll explain.
When my cat, Mr. Freckles died, I wouldn't touch him. I poked him with a stick to try to coax him back to life but it didn’t work. He was already stiff and his legs were stuck straight up by the time I found him. Unfortunately he chose to kick the bucket in the middle of our driveway. Now my dad has this bad habit of barreling in without noticing if there is something already in the driveway. We’ve lost a lot of bicycles that way. It was bad enough that Mr. Freckles was dead, but I couldn’t stand the idea that he’d be flattened out and forever stuck to a tire forever.
So I phoned my friend Tammy. We all called her ‘Tammy the Fearless’ because she would do anything we dared her to do. She could kill a bug as good as any boy. In fact, she had a collection of her favorite kills. If anyone would know how to deal with this situation Tammy would.
“Tammy it’s an emergency!” I said over the phone. “Mr. Freckles is dead and in the driveway. We have to get him moved before my dad comes home.”
“Oh cool. I’ll be right over. Do you have a shovel?”
I did or at least my father did. It took a few minutes to find it in the garage but by the time I came out she was already waiting for me with a big black garbage bag and her mom’s dishwashing gloves.
“What are the gloves for?” I asked as I held the bag open. She put on the gloves and took the shovel from me.
“To prevent death cooties,” she said while trying to plug her nose with her upper lip by pushing it with her tongue. Death cooties are the worse kind of cooties you can get. They’re way worse than little boy cooties that you can get if you get stuck sitting next to one in an assembly. Death cooties don’t wash off and you can’t run away screaming from your own hands. So the gloves were inspired.
She scooped up the remains of our dearly departed while I held the bag open. He kind of stuck to the shovel so she had to push him the rest of the way off with her gloved hand.
“Don’t you want to throw the gloves in the bag?” I asked as I was trying to gather the top of the bag together without touching any part that may have touched the cat.
“Nah, my mom will kill me if I don’t put them back. She hates it when I use her stuff.”
“Um, Tammy, what about the death cooties on the gloves? They’ll get all over your dishes.” She looked at me like it was my fault. She tore off the gloves like a surgeon on a bad medical soap opera and threw them in the bag.
“You owe my mom a new pair of gloves and a really good excuse what happened to her old ones,” she whispered in my ear with an incredibly good gangster voice.
“I promise. But right now we have to take care of Mr. Freckles.” I stifled the urge to shudder as we threw Mr. Freckles, bag and all in the dumpster like he was yesterday’s garbage. I felt awful. He was a member of my family after all. No one would throw an uncle in the dumpster, although they did find one of the non-extreme uncles in one once. But I'm pretty sure they didn’t leave him there.
The only dead human I've ever seen is me. But I’m sitting here on a chair in my dining room looking at my own dead body and all I can do is wish I’d shaved my legs this morning. OH GOD, I’m a big death cootie!
Being afraid of death wasn't the only thing I was afraid of either. I was afraid of anything that fluttered, birds, butterflies, even confetti freaks me out. And oh, you know those cans of biscuits that explode when you pop them with a fork? Those terrified me. Elevators? I hate elevators. But everyone is afraid of elevators, aren’t they? I have a theory that the elevator people don’t want you thinking about the fact that the only thing between you and your immediate, untimely death is an ancient cable they bought from a secondhand cable store. Why do you think they try to distract you with ‘Elevator Music?’
And oh yeah, I get panic attacks. Oh Man! Those are awful! My heart starts pounding and I can’t breath. But you know what? Panic attacks are worse than death! Go figure.
Hey, isn't there supposed to be a long tunnel with a light at the end when you die? And where are all my dead relatives? So I didn’t go to their funerals, I’m still their niece! I thought at least Mr. Freckles would be here to greet me but he's probably still pissed about the dumpster.
I think I've read the “Dear Fake Abby” column in the freebie newspaper I left on the table about a million times already and I’ve only been dead for an hour. The Dear Fake Abby column is usually my favorite column in one of those papers they leave on your doorstep every week with the ads. It’s incredibly stupid. The questions are lame and the answers have to be written by the same person who wrote the question. Too bad I can’t figure out how to hold a pen or I'd write a question they couldn't answer. 'Dear Fake Abbey, I'm dead. What should I do?"
I'm just glad I left out something to read. What if I’d turned into one of those clean freak types like Robert wanted me to be? The next time you put a newspaper in the recycling bin ask yourself, ‘in case of my untimely death, have I left anything out that's interesting to read?”
Somebody better find me soon. I hate the idea of me sprawled out on the floor like that. I mean, there’s no blood and I'm not gross or anything. But what if I’m here for a while and I begin to, well you know,-- smell. Now there is a niche market that even Madison Avenue hasn’t exploited yet. ‘Corpse Deodorant! For when you don’t know how long it will be before you’re found.’
posted by Jozidreamer @ 1:51 AM
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