Working Title: ‘Only Child ‘
Part One:
Opening scene
’Hand to sky, sky to ground, reaching up from a burial mound.’
Dragging body and soul from the pit. Memory blank, sensations numb. Nagging and growing hunger.
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I was not always dead as you might have guessed. However I’m still putting things together. I remember small things but only in snapshot images accompanied by strong emotions.
It’s been roughly a week since I pulled myself from, what I can only assume to have been my own grave. I spent this time hiding amongst tombstones and mausoleums. Trying to remember.
The name on the grave, my grave, etched in Old English letters, read Jonathan Jameson, Loving Father and Husband 19xx - 20xx.
If this were true it means I have a wife and at least one child. This thought keeps me going. Not that I have much choice. Guess I could climb back into the ground. I’d have to pick a different grave since mine has been re-filled.
A curious thing, the refilling of my grave. Four men, one on a backfill tractor and the other three pushing dirt with shovels and other tools. The curiousness of it? That’s the last anyone has visited my plot. You’d think if a grave had been desecrated and a body gone missing, someone, like the police, might find an interest in something like that. Or at least interesting enough to drive out and have a looks-see. Not one soul has come near my grave least of all the police.
In my current state I don’t seem to need sleep. So, I wander at night and during the day I hide and peek a lot. So I can be, fairly, certain no one has been to my grave. This can only mean a few things as far as I can figure. No one told the police, someone told the police and they don’t care, or they care but do not want to investigate. The last one is my conspiracy theory. After a week alone in a graveyard, with no memory of how I became mostly dead, I’ve comes up with numerous conspiracies.
My most imaginative theory so far has been that the police or someone connected to them had me killed and they are in the midst of a coverup. This of course is most likely the most unlikely scenario I have come up with to date. For one thing there is no sign of injury to my body. No gunshot wound, strangled marks, no stabby holes, no sign of how I died at all.
The truth is probably something as mundane as falling off a ladder onto my noggin. How I died has become less important to me than why I didn’t stay dead.
Only Child: Part Two:
It’s been two weeks since that fateful day when I arose from the pit. Ominous sounding? Well, I’ve become somewhat melancholic over the last week. No questions answered or memories remembered and I’m beginning to itch. And I’m hungry. Oh God am I hungry. One would think being deadish and all I’d have lost the need to eat; like I have for sleep. Seems not, I’m famished. Odd thing though, any of my old favorite foods such as, hamburger and fries with a chocolate milk shake, a po-boy stuffed to the brim with craw-fish, or even something as simple as biscuits and gravy, just the thought of them brings about the greatest feelings of nausea. Odd.
“Jonathan” Startled, I turn to see nothing but an empty graveyard illuminated by moonlight. “Jonathan, I have returned for you”, I look around franticly but see nothing. It’s as if the wind itself is calling my name.
Out from behind a particularly tall tombstone emerges a dark figure. Shouldn’t be though, there is enough moonlight here that I can almost make out the writing on the same said tombstone. No, the figure itself is creating its own darkness. At this very moment I decide emphatically that this whole business is quite creepy.
“Show yourself” I say a little more timidly than I had planned.
“Jonathan I have returned for you.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve said this already. Now explain yourself.” I demanded.
“Oh, well fine then” the darkness around the figure disappears, in its place stands a rather ordinary looking fellow. Dressed in all black head to toe with the most ridiculous looking wide brimmed hat I’ve ever seen with wisps of orange hair poking out from underneath. He grabs his lapel stands tall and says, “Fine, but it’s your loss, I’ve always found the darkness and haunting voice best for creating feelings of mystery and anticipation. Give it a bit of ambiance, you know?. ”
“What? No, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t care much for mystery or ambiance. Now tell me what this is all about and what you know about me being mostly dead. ” I say.
“Mostly dead?” He laughs. “You’re not mostly dead you are all dead. So to speak. Un-dead I guess would be the proper term for it. Either way, there is not a jot of life in your whole body.”
He goes on “You see, twelve-hundred years ago there was this monk who belonged to a secret order of…”
“Look” I say, “I’m sure your little story is super interesting and all, but what I’m concerned with at present is my story…”
“This is your story young man. Now as I was saying— twelve hundred years ago there was this monk…”
Ok, so he rambles on for some time about this monk guy. Something about secret orders of necrophilia or some such. How this order had survived through ages until present day. I wasn’t really paying attention. Anyway near the end of his, obviously, practiced soliloquy he did say something that caught my ear.
“… After that it was an easy choice to make, we’d have to make you un-dead.”
“Wait, you had to do what?” I say.
—To be continued—