Grave by Joan Frances Turner

night, when we were sure Renee and especially Lisa were both asleep: I’ve tried it , Linc said, I’ve tried all this, living and dead, and I’m like Sam was: I just don’t like it. Jessie, if we ever get the choice back and can decide for ourselves, again—
    I didn’t know what to say, back then, lying with foreheads touching and fingers twined together, hearing the rustles and calls and cries of nighttime through the newfound barriers of walls and window. We’d fought for this life-afterlife-after-death, all of us had; we’d wrenched it back and dropped it into our own waiting laps and how am I supposed to promise to give it up again, say a fuck-you that big and then agree to just get fucked in turn? So I didn’t promise to give up on life, not then, because I couldn’t decide and because even if I said yes, even if I wanted to right then and there, we’d been left no choice. Just like poor Sam, who tried so hard to get out of his human life and then just woke up again, right where he was, as one of us. At least now Sam, my old Sam, he had what he’d always wanted. He was gone.
    Enough! Annie, back in the old days, she’d look at me right now and go, Girl, you’re turning soft, what you need is a good goddamned fight. Her, Joe, always right there to give me one. I missed that, the constant mad twitching urge to kick, punch, bite, wrench necks and break bones, do something with all the energy pulsing inside me. Did I miss that? Would fists and feet be anything now but another dutiful task? I didn’t even know that feeling now anyway. It all drained straight out of me when I became a new sort of human. Inhuman. I’d had no choice.
    And if Renee wanted her Big Answers so bad, she could fucking well find them herself. Whatever this was—if it was anything at all—we’d just get through it, like we had the sickness, and not waste time asking any damned questions.
    Because when we weren’t looking and we still thought we owned ourselves, that life and death might actually be in our own hands, getting through it had become our one duty, our sole and endless chore. Because one way or another, we just didn’t have any choice.
    Sitting on the last bit of powdery piled-up sand before it all went damp and smooth from the tides, it felt like being on a little island unto itself divorced from the rest of the beach. I perched at the edge of the dry with my heels dug into the wet, the lake rolling inward in a heavy, easy wave that never quite reached my toes, and when I looked up again I saw a vast, dark figure silhouetted against the horizon, walking slow and easy toward me over the surface of the waters.
    A muscle in my leg wrenched and twisted as I struggled to my feet. The ashen pearl sky, the sun swelling up flame-colored and full as sunset crept closer, they made a pale illuminated border all around him, a corona, his darkness like the burnt-out hole in a photograph someone set on fire. The great shadow of him took shape as he came closer and it was Jim, my brother, it was my father, it was poor blinded Lillian from the undead days and it was Ben who’d died alongside Sam and it was me, it was my own self and my dead departed face coming toward me faster and faster, walking so easy on the Lake Michigan waters. I was smiling at myself standing so small and astonished here on the beach, pleased to meet me. Every step I took from horizon to shore covered miles in a single moment. I was inches away from myself now, smiling and holding my arms out in greeting and all around me was that same border of pearly light, fiery rays of sun, blinding suffocating light all outside and inside me, inside the arms I’d wrap around me in ceaseless, perpetual embrace, nothing but night—
    I was lying on my side half-coated in wet sand, no memory of stumbling or falling. I took in shallow gulps of air, like a beached fish, and my whole chest was one hollow constricted ache; something had passed straight through it, seizing my