The First by Jason Mott

 
    It was just over a year since Edmund died, and just over a month since Emily stopped wearing her engagement ring. She removed it late one night in a fit of insomnia during which the voices of all of her friends and family seemed to come crashing down on her at once, all of them telling her that it was time to let Edmund go. She still carried it with her, tucked away beneath her shirt on the small gold necklace her grandmother had given her when she turned sixteen. Not long after that, her grandmother passed away and Emily hadn’t taken off the necklace since.
    She had never been one for letting go.
    The discolored band around Emily’s finger was finally starting to vanish, and with it the heartache that was left behind by a fiancé she would never get the chance to marry. And now, without explanation or provocation, Edmund was not dead anymore. He was alive somehow, and on the television, standing among a scrum of reporters in front of his office building, looking overwhelmed and confused and afraid.
    “Can you believe it?” Emily’s mother asked through the phone. She had called Emily in a panic, yelling for her to stop what she was doing and turn on the television. “It’s a miracle,” she said, over and over again, almost to the point of hysteria. “It’s one of God’s greatest miracles.”
    When Emily switched on the television, there he was—lanky as ever, his hair combed straight and low over his forehead, his lip turned at that familiar awkward angle it found when he was nervous. It was the same expression he wore on the day he proposed to her.
    Emily’s chest tightened and her legs went weak. She collapsed onto her knees in front of the television, her entire body trembling. She clutched the engagement ring that hung from her neck. “This isn’t real,” she said. “It can’t be.”
    “They say he just showed up at work this morning,” her mother said. “Can you believe it? Dead and buried over a year ago and then he just shows up at work again.” On the screen, Edmund was being led away from his office building by a handful of policemen and a group of men in very official-looking suits.
    “It’s a joke,” Emily said. “Some kind of hoax. That can’t be Edmund.”
    They both grew silent as they watched in amazement at the impossible scene unfolding on the television. “Just look at him,” Emily’s mother said, her voice laced with confusion and wonder. “Just look at that shaggy mop of hair, his eyes. That’s Edmund....”
    But Emily did not hear her mother. The telephone had fallen to the floor at her knees and she could not take her eyes off the television. She was clutching the ring in her fist so tightly that her hand began to cramp. Her heart thumped inside her chest.
    It was Edmund. Her eyes told her and her heart confirmed it as the tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped softly to the floor.
    But how could that be? How could he be alive?
    Hadn’t she, just a month ago, finally succeeded in letting him go?
    * * *
    He had been dead for just over a year—the poor victim of a bus accident on his way to work—and now, through some method or magic, Edmund Blithe was no longer dead. And Emily, the woman who had loved him and almost married him, was still trying to understand what it all meant.
    She spent too much time thinking back to their last day together. It haunted her. They had only just moved in together—both of them still living out of boxes and promising that one of these weekends they would properly unpack and, finally, have something they could call home. They spent their last full day together knocking around a hardware store, picking paint swatches and faucets. He had been anxious all day, distracted to the point of nervousness. And when Emily asked him what was the matter, he would only grin—with his lip at that familiar, awkward angle—and lie to her and say “Nothing.”
    She considered calling him on it, but decided against it. He was a terrible