Hilary used to get very annoyed when tourists turned up with portable sound systems playing Thriller at full blast, or shouting: “They don’t want bread, they want brainzzz!” but that kind of thing has been happening less and less since the state barricaded the highway and put up all of those “Quarantine” signs.
And there’s hardly been a single crime since the day a guy who was stripping the lead off a dead person’s roof slipped and fell, breaking his neck. He’s been in the park ever since, walking sideways with his head twisted over one shoulder.
I don’t think the dead feel any pain. When I used to visit Alice in her room, I’d always ask her: “Do you feel any pain? Do you feel anything?”
But she’d never answer.
Then one day as we sat with me talking and her staring into space, I picked up a pin and jabbed it, hard, into her arm.
She moved her head slightly, just enough to look down at the pin.
“You felt that, didn’t you?” I said. “Does it hurt?”
She went back to staring into space.
When she stood up to leave for the park, the pin was still protruding from her arm.
I reached up and pulled it out; she didn’t notice.
The dead don’t seem to age, either. Eating only a few bites of bread a day-plus one piece of chocolate cake a month-they’ve all lost a bit of weight, but otherwise they haven’t changed.
I’d kind of expected their hair to keep growing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Which is probably just as well because the dead’s hair is invariably a mess. Someone living always has to comb it for them because for some reason they will not do it themselves.
The one exception to this is Rosemary Harold, who died without a single hair on her body-not even an eyelash-because she’d been in the middle of chemotherapy.
Alice is one of the few dead people in the park who hasn’t been reduced to wearing hand-me-downs thanks to her mother, who still buys her new clothes when she needs them.
The first couple of years, she used to take her to the mall, which wasn’t easy since the sales people didn’t like serving the dead and wouldn’t let her try anything on, and there was one guard who’d obviously seen Dawn of the Dead on television and would always follow them around, scowling, from the minute they arrived. But Alice’s mother persevered because she said it was the one time Alice actually seemed to know where she was and why she was there. She even claimed Alice would invariably head straight for the most expensive thing in the shop, just like she did when she was alive.
Not that it matters now the mall is shut.
At one time this town had five churches, four cafes, six bars, two auto dealerships, three banks, two primary schools, a high school, a motel, a funeral parlour, and a meat-packing plant (which closed the day after a calf’s head on a shelf in the freezer room was seen blinking). All of them are boarded up now. So are most of the houses.
The streets are full of abandoned dogs and cats. It’s the live ones you’ve got to watch out for, because they’re nervous.
My next door neighbour adopted a dead dog. When I asked her why, she said, “Why not? He’s no trouble and he doesn’t bark.”
Five years ago, they said it was a miracle I was still alive. Three weeks ago they told me the miracle was coming to an end; my organs were shutting down one by one. All because of one stupid thing I did one night when I was sixteen.
People told me my only hope was to get out of this town before I died. They told me it only happens here; if I die somewhere else, I won’t wake up. I won’t end up with those zombies in the park.
I’m sure all those people were right, but I knew something they didn’t know.
I’ve been going to the same doctor since I was a kid-he’s the only doctor in town these days-and the last time I saw him, he said he was going to tell me a secret.
Remember I told you about when it all first started, and how they shipped a man’s body to another state to see if he would wake up, and he did?
It turns out my doctor was sent along to accompany the body. He was there when the man woke up, and he’d asked him: “What was it like being dead? Do you remember any of it?”
And to his amazement, the man had answered him.
“He spoke?” I said.
My doctor nodded. “Only that one time, and never again. Considering what he said, I thought it was best to keep quiet about it.”
“Why? What did he say?”
“All you need to know is: there are a lot worse places a person could end up,” my doctor said as I left his office that last time, “than in the park.”
I went to the park today and saw a dead man sitting on a bench with Hilary Frentzen combing his hair.
What is it about the dead that they refuse to comb their own hair? For five years I had been telling myself that I would be the exception. I would be the one who speaks, who dresses herself, who eats vegetables, who continues to do simple things like comb her own hair… but with every moment that passed, these things seemed less and less important.
The next thing I knew, I was standing face to face with Alice. And for the first time in five years, she looked at me as if she knew me.
Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco by Seth Lindberg
Seth Lindberg’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Phantom, Denying Death, The Darker Side, Brainbox, Brainbox II, Haunting the Dead, Jack Haringa Must Die!, Jigsaw Nation, and in the magazines Not One of Us, Twilight Showcase, Gothic.net, and Chiaroscuro. He is also a former editor of Gothic.net and currently works as a sysadmin in San Francisco, where, as the title implies, this story takes place.
In nineteenth-century photographs, nobody is smiling. The subjects sit rigid and stare out at you with cold, serious expressions. You might think humor hadn’t been invented yet, but actually cameras in those days had such long exposure times that no one wanted to hold a smile for that long. People, at least, can be instructed not to move; photographing animals proved more challenging. One early photographer decided that the only way to get a pair of stray dogs to sit still long enough for him to take their picture was to shoot them with bullets, stuff them, and position their stiff, lifeless bodies in front of his camera. In the resulting photographs, of course, the dogs appear to be alive.
This brings us to our next story, which also features photos of things that seem to be alive but aren’t. Photographs connect us to the past, fading only a little over time, especially compared with our memories, which quickly become vague and distorted. Since the dawn of photography people have obsessively compiled photo albums, keeping important memories locked safely in place. With the advent of digital cameras, it’s not unusual for a person’s personal collection to run to hundreds or even thousands of images. But what if all of that disappeared? What if a handful of photos were all that remained to remind you of an entire world, now lost?
Our next story is about just such a collection, and, as in nineteenth-century photographs, in most of these photos, nobody is smiling.
My ex-girlfriend May used to accuse me of starting every story or joke straight in the middle. Like she had to ask a thousand questions just to figure out what the hell I was talking about. I’d just babble on and she’d have to route me back to all the concrete facts about the case at hand. I can’t help it! I’m bad with beginnings: I’m suspicious of them as they are. Life doesn’t begin, not really.
Well, life begins in the physical sense, but as far as your memories go, it’s not like that. It’s not like one day you remember things, the day before you didn’t. These memories kind of fade out back, little moments, like a vision of your dad’s face, the way the back porch smelled. The rest you got to fill in, you suppose all together. A lot like pictures, really. People all frozen in these expressions they never really have because you caught them in mid-motion or something, you have to fill in who it is and what they’re about based on that one moment.