When things die

“What is it?” she asked, too loudly, from behind me, her voice at once hesitant and nagging.

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “It’s been dead a long time.”

Though it was dead, it moved, teeming with a life not its own, crawling with maggots and ants. I poked it again with a long straight stick.

“Do you think we should tell someone?” she asked. Her voice was meant to convey concern, but I knew that that she just wanted to gossip, put herself at the centre of the neighbourhood and inform everyone, in the gravest terms, of the mysterious remains in the empty lot.

“We found a dead thing!” I sang, my voice falsetto, my hands fluttering girlishly, exaggerating her volatility. Her face fell at my mockery, and I suspected that I had made a mistake, but I blundered on. “Who are we going to tell anyway?” I asked, incredulous. “ And what are we going to say? That we found a dead raccoon or something? What’s anybody going to care?”

“It might not be a racoon. I thought maybe it was a cat, someone’s cat,” she said, much more quietly. I rolled my eyes in mock disgust.

“It’s not a cat,” I said, with much more certainty than I felt. “Besides, what are we going to do, put up posters? Nobody’s going to recognize... it now.” She sat on her haunches behind me as I pushed the cat, or whatever it was, up with the stick. It was stiff and flat as a board, with gaping leathery holes where its eyes should have been, its teeth bared in a final, horrible grimace.

“I don’t want to look at it anymore,” she said without moving.

“If you don’t want to look,” I said slyly, “you can just leave.” I didn’t look back to see her reaction; I didn’t have to. I knew she’d stay. I moved it again, and watched beetles scuttle into little tunnels in the dirt under the carcass, eager to escape my gaze. Suddenly, I was very bored. There was no great mystery here, nothing meaningful or important to uncover, nothing to solve. It was dead long enough that I could not picture it alive – for all I could see, it had lain in state since the foundations of the earth. “Let’s go,” I said, turning and brushing past her. She skipped along the path behind me as I headed back toward home. I listened to her sing as she skipped. She had a beautiful voice. It oppressed me. When she sang, which was often, I would panic, immediately seek some interruption, some way to stop the music. She was only singing, and it was beautiful, but I wanted it to stop. “Why can’t she just walk normally?” I fumed silently to myself. “Why does she have to skip? Why is she always singing?” I thought of what I could say to cut her off, but I needn’t have worried about it: she changed the subject herself.

“Still,” she said thoughtfully, “It’s sad when things die.”