Dawn
And
The
Dead
by
Nicholas John
Dawn Garcia overslept the day
that the dead rose and claimed the world as their own.
It was understandable enough –
she’d had a bad week, (had, in fact, been going through a hell of a
rough patch recently).
She wasn’t sleeping well, her
dreams realms of horror and pestilent, rotting death; tearing her
down to hell every time that she closed her eyes and drifted off to
sleep. In her nightmares, she saw his face. The face of
Eddie Garcia, although in those dark and rancid dreams it was
different, a ghastly death mask of decomposing corruption. In her
nightmares, Dawn is in the kitchen. She’s making breakfast for
her daughter Vickie and herself, frying bacon, when the sound comes
from the garden:
She notices that every other
sound has become but echoes, distant and hollow as if retreating as
that one sound, the music that consumed her with dread when Eddie
Garcia was alive, once again, impossibly, pours in through the open
kitchen window.
She often thought ( more in
waking and recalling the dream than experiencing it ) that it
reminded her of a cowboy western movie. That pivotal moment when
someone important strides into the saloon and all the laughing,
piano music and tinkling of glasses, dies away instantly.
The sound, which has merely
been one of the multitude of the ambient noises of life, is now
standing alone in the otherwise silence. It comes to her ears and
she shudders, muttering a long, “No…” which folds into a
tortured moan of despair.
It is his vihuela; he is playing Somos Novios – and playing it badly.
Eddie always plays his vihuela
on the way home, late at night, after swallowing enough tequila to
drown a whale. As always, it sounds alright for a while, happy,
bouncy… but the closer he gets, the more mistakes he makes and she
can make out a missed note here, the wrong note there, and then a
total, drunken splash of frantic, angry, incorrect music.
In her nightmares , the badly
played vihuela strings sting her ears from their garden. Dawn walks
over to the curtain, peels it away from the corner of the window
and looks out nervously - just as she had when he was alive and
returning home.
Eddie has always been
frightening in this state. Is wild and unpredictable. He beats her,
almost killed her once. And if he didn’t beat her, he forced
himself on her. Stinking tequila breath blasting into her face in
bursts of gasps as she lay there motionless and staring away.
As frightening as Eddie was in
life, in the nightmares, and consequently in death - he is a very
different monster.
Death is feasting hungrily on
the corpse of Eddie Garcia.
He stands bare-chested in the
garden. There are rips and holes in the thighs of his jeans, and in
the strands of gnawed flesh beneath, insects crawl, writhe, scuttle
and burrow, hiding sometimes behind the pale, bruise-dappled flesh
and exposed bone that protrudes.
The vihuela, hanging from guitar
straps thrown over Eddie’s shoulders, hide the pestilent mess of
his stomach. Yet that seems to make it worse, as instead of seeing
his guts flopping and writhing sloppily back and for, she imagines
it.
In the nightmares, his hands
move back and for with an eerie slowness, too slow in fact to be
producing the notes that play from the Spanish guitar. Those
hands, or those fingers to be more precise, they had been so slim,
slender and dextrous - when he played, they seemed to shimmer
magically, like the wings of a hummingbird. And they had been so
soft and smooth as they lovingly caressed her skin or pushed an
errant strand of hair from her eyes.
They had not always been so
soft.
Not when they were curled
spitefully into fists and crashing into her ribs, or chopping
across her face in startling slaps.
Now his hands are dead. Some of
his finger still resemble fingers, except they are thick, rotten
yellow and black - like overripe bananas; the fingernails on those
digits are cracked and yellow and dry, dead
And
The
Dead
by
Nicholas John
Dawn Garcia overslept the day
that the dead rose and claimed the world as their own.
It was understandable enough –
she’d had a bad week, (had, in fact, been going through a hell of a
rough patch recently).
She wasn’t sleeping well, her
dreams realms of horror and pestilent, rotting death; tearing her
down to hell every time that she closed her eyes and drifted off to
sleep. In her nightmares, she saw his face. The face of
Eddie Garcia, although in those dark and rancid dreams it was
different, a ghastly death mask of decomposing corruption. In her
nightmares, Dawn is in the kitchen. She’s making breakfast for
her daughter Vickie and herself, frying bacon, when the sound comes
from the garden:
She notices that every other
sound has become but echoes, distant and hollow as if retreating as
that one sound, the music that consumed her with dread when Eddie
Garcia was alive, once again, impossibly, pours in through the open
kitchen window.
She often thought ( more in
waking and recalling the dream than experiencing it ) that it
reminded her of a cowboy western movie. That pivotal moment when
someone important strides into the saloon and all the laughing,
piano music and tinkling of glasses, dies away instantly.
The sound, which has merely
been one of the multitude of the ambient noises of life, is now
standing alone in the otherwise silence. It comes to her ears and
she shudders, muttering a long, “No…” which folds into a
tortured moan of despair.
It is his vihuela; he is playing Somos Novios – and playing it badly.
Eddie always plays his vihuela
on the way home, late at night, after swallowing enough tequila to
drown a whale. As always, it sounds alright for a while, happy,
bouncy… but the closer he gets, the more mistakes he makes and she
can make out a missed note here, the wrong note there, and then a
total, drunken splash of frantic, angry, incorrect music.
In her nightmares , the badly
played vihuela strings sting her ears from their garden. Dawn walks
over to the curtain, peels it away from the corner of the window
and looks out nervously - just as she had when he was alive and
returning home.
Eddie has always been
frightening in this state. Is wild and unpredictable. He beats her,
almost killed her once. And if he didn’t beat her, he forced
himself on her. Stinking tequila breath blasting into her face in
bursts of gasps as she lay there motionless and staring away.
As frightening as Eddie was in
life, in the nightmares, and consequently in death - he is a very
different monster.
Death is feasting hungrily on
the corpse of Eddie Garcia.
He stands bare-chested in the
garden. There are rips and holes in the thighs of his jeans, and in
the strands of gnawed flesh beneath, insects crawl, writhe, scuttle
and burrow, hiding sometimes behind the pale, bruise-dappled flesh
and exposed bone that protrudes.
The vihuela, hanging from guitar
straps thrown over Eddie’s shoulders, hide the pestilent mess of
his stomach. Yet that seems to make it worse, as instead of seeing
his guts flopping and writhing sloppily back and for, she imagines
it.
In the nightmares, his hands
move back and for with an eerie slowness, too slow in fact to be
producing the notes that play from the Spanish guitar. Those
hands, or those fingers to be more precise, they had been so slim,
slender and dextrous - when he played, they seemed to shimmer
magically, like the wings of a hummingbird. And they had been so
soft and smooth as they lovingly caressed her skin or pushed an
errant strand of hair from her eyes.
They had not always been so
soft.
Not when they were curled
spitefully into fists and crashing into her ribs, or chopping
across her face in startling slaps.
Now his hands are dead. Some of
his finger still resemble fingers, except they are thick, rotten
yellow and black - like overripe bananas; the fingernails on those
digits are cracked and yellow and dry, dead
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