The stars wink at me, shining eyes in a midnight blanket, but with no mouth to smile, or ears to hear my cry: I can’t get out. I seep into the earth, like the river when it wells with tears on a blistering summer day, as if it misses the birds that played on its shores and the young deer that kissed its reflective cheek. They are gone, and none to hear my cry, “I can’t get out.” I am her river now, and she drinks without a mouth. Where are her ears to hear my wail, “I can’t get out”?
My breathing tomb has a lid of dried flesh, a case of bones, and a lining of rotten tendons. No silks, no padding, no pillows, no eternal dark underneath the ground; yet the worms have settled in my clouded eyes, and my dripping tongue can taste the dead. Their mothers buzz in my ears, kiss my papery cheeks, and leave their children to comfort me with slimy armless arms, eyeless eyes, but no ears to hear my cry, “I can’t get out.”
Others roam, wander, wailing the eternal mantra, “I can’t get out, I can’t get out!” We search for those who can free us, who can hear, who can do. Sometimes I wait and watch. Someone will come.
When the angry sky shrieks and its frigid breath freezes my stiff breast, I smell warm bread birthing from a brick womb of fire and wood. Someone is here. Hope and dread spring to the dead vestiges of my heart. I limp out into the icy shrapnel careening from the shredded clouds. It tears the thin shreds of paper-skin from my bones, like the curved cat claws that dug into my flesh when I stole her tiny kitten from the burrow beneath the porch.
Lallycat, with her wiggling orange stripes, yellow eyes, and whiskers fringing her tiny mouth, had ever stayed on my heels. I was the mother I stole her from. The claw marks were my deed of ownership, my badge of honor. Lallycat’s mother should have been grateful. A massive tom had feasted on her children like hors d’oeuvres, or the most delicate and saltiest of caviars.
Now Lallycat lives inside me. The sharp dry mass of her tail still coils in a corner of my stomach. Lallycat never wanted to leave me, even after rotting black teeth sank into my once tender flesh like ink into goatskin paper. She remains, no matter how many others force their way out of my rickety throat and leave me behind.
I stagger inside the bakery. The oven’s golden brown child sits on the counter. Its soul dances over its smooth skin. Its breath is hot, its flesh is soft, but nothing rushes through throbbing veins and beating heart. I wait at a dusty table for my fleshy meal of pulsing heart and stuffed bones.
The father comes. Breath expands pink lungs; steaming blood pouring through slick veins, like the cars that raced on rainy streets in the midnight light of yellow street lamps and rosy brake lights. Their bright eyes streamed down the mirror road and into the night. Waves of gilded water washed their tracks, and I could not follow.
I leap to my crooked feet. My exposed bones ripping across the dirty tiles, I lunge for that relentless heartbeat. My fingers slip through the tender flesh. Rivers of roses stream from his gurgling throat, splash my parched tongue and wash my yellowed eyes. He bats at my decomposing face, tears the wriggling flesh from my cheek. I have to get him inside me, where souls meet heart to heart. Little does he realize that once inside, his heart will make mine beat again. His soul will wrap its hand around my trapped spirit and pull it free.
Empty the marrow, drain the blood, chew the flesh, suck clean the eyes; I am two becoming one. Life flows into the chasm of my being like cold water dropping into an empty gut. It mixes with the parchment lining of my stomach where lives are written, lives are lost, and lives have escaped. Hope stirs for the thousandth time, the millionth time, the first time. The soul to set me free stares into my eyes. Clouds cover them, and then they shrivel into the misshapen dead. Only silence screams from the open mouth.
I know he is inside me. Now he will free me. I sit. I wait.
My stomach twists and turns, my throat constricts. His soul is forcing escape, and he won’t take me with him. I double over in pain. He claws up my throat like a desperate animal trapped in a cage, planted over a mound of the big red ants that used to tunnel from one yard to another, until the neighborhood was connected like the bonds of invisible love. This walking coffin hasn’t enough restraints to keep him in. He gushes from my mouth. Blood, flesh, and bone spatter the floor. His steaming soul takes flight with swirling wings, and then he is gone.
I can’t get out.
Black globs fill my vision and transport me to the bookstore, the grocery story, the pet store where baby animals no longer leap with excitement when I come in. The yips of puppies, the mewls of kittens, and the chirping of birds echo in the store’s memory.
Sometimes my mouth is smeared with new souls. Sometimes I am releasing them with heaving jerks in my abdomen. All the souls glide away, and no matter how I reach, no matter if I seize them, they slip through my fingers.
“I can’t get out,” I rasp after them. “Take me with you!” None ever answer.
Now I’m in the shopping center, where the clothes lie untouched. Here I had bought a pink blouse, a white skirt, and shining high heels. This was where I had gone to the make-up counter, the hair salon, and the food court to show off my beauty. Here my pink blouse smeared with blood. Here my flesh liquefied and seeped into my skirt, filling my shining shoes with gleaming mucus. No make-up can cover this corpse’s face, no hair stylist can save the residual locks of jetty hair. I can count on my remaining fingers how many I have left.
Memories fade in and out like the yellow paint on a cracking road. Faces full of life chortle, mouths smile without words, eyes gleam without blood. The floor clears of dead leaves, broken sticks, and jutting trees. A song echoes from the recesses of memory. Warm lips press against mine, strong arms circle me about, and then they lift like the baker’s slippery soul. The trees, sticks, and leaves return. Only they can hear me weep, “I can’t get out.”
I run my pointed jerky-like fingers over the glass check-out counter. It smears with blood and brown juices. Sunlight glints on them like gold, as if I’m not completely trapped, as if I can stop my incessant wail, “I can’t get out!”
The tinkle of glass calls to my shriveled ears. As I turn with a wheezing gasp, a bit of bone rips through my knee. It’s white, pure and uncontaminated as virgin snow. Under heavy-laden trees, through plump white bushes, across the smooth expanse of meadow, my boots had cut trails of adventure.
“Walking tomb, walking corpse,” calls the tinkling glass, “walking coffin, here is life, here is the soul who will set you free. No longer be like the turtle that carries its shell everywhere it goes.”
I limp through the dead clothes, the smeared glass counter, the scattered make-ups in their dead casings. Their souls still gleam through clear plastic eyes, pink, blue, green, gold, silver, and white. They can’t get out. I won’t let them out. They have to stay this time, and I can leave.
I hurry towards the glass. I push through the green plastic foliage of a bush in the middle of the mall. It’s smattered with grime and dust, stuck and immobile as me. A man and woman start. Their blood races, their hearts pump, and I see the volatile souls gleaming like glittering fish in their wide liquid orbs. Two souls to set me free. My stomach groans and I charge with outstretched hands.
The man points a gun with two long barrels, gaping as wide as the cave where I had seen the strange child run, the child with rotting teeth and poison saliva, the child that inked into my flesh the sign of the coffin walker.
“Kelly,” the woman cries, holding up her hands, “Kelly!” Silver petals from a ravaged flower dribble from her dark eyes and down her gaunt cheeks. The soul is already trying to escape. I must pull it inside me before it all gets away.
“It isn’t her anymore, Tanya,” the man shouts.
For a moment, his voice stops me. His face used to be youthful, carefree, smiling. Now it’s lined, hard, and full of sorrow. A phantom puts strong arms around me, presses my shriveled lips. The phantom laughs, runs, waves at me from a car door when the autumn leaves sprinkle from an invisible treasure chest in the sky. Then it fades. My stomach growls, my mouth contorts into a grin, and I charge.
Tanya presses her hands to her face and screams. I’m no more than five feet away when the barrels explode in a shower of yellow and red fireworks. It kicks me in the face and I fly back. Dried limbs clack to the floor, bones crush to powder, like the flour I used to make bread with on summer days, cooking in the kitchen with my mother.
I can’t see, I can’t smell, but I can hear the woman’s wails. Her slender fingers touch what’s left of my mummified skull.
“Rest in peace, Kelly.”
They bind me in a blanket. I struggle to move, to speak, but nothing will work. There is digging, dirt dropping, metal spades slicing untouched ground. Strong arms circle around me and the man whispers, “I love you, Kelly.” Meaningless sounds, because he won’t let me devour him. Meaningless sounds because he won’t let me devour the woman. Meaningless sounds because these entities with the fish waving in their eyes have become like the globs that transport me from one place to another.
He lays me in the cold ground. Heavy slabs of dead dirt hit my stomach and head. This is a coffin within a coffin, always alive, but never living. Beneath the ground in the eternal dark, there are no eyes to see and no ears to hear the cry of my lipless mouth: “I can’t get out.”
End
Copyright © by Julia Benally 2019
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this work are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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“Coffin Walker” was first published in Siren’s Call Publications, issue 43, February 26, 2019
Mara Duryea 