Requiem in D Minor blared as Francis scanned groceries. The same six compositions played on loop each day and Francis had all of the melodies memorized, not in her mind but in her body, like a wind-up doll that had been twisted and tightened to a specific course of action. Her hands moved meticulously from cart to counter before passing each item to Alan. Alan bagged, bagging whatever came his way––baked beans, crackers, condoms, Sprite. He bagged the roses separately. He didn’t want to smush the petals.
“Is that all today?” Alan asked.
“That’ll do it!” The customer was pink-cheeked and round all over.
“Big date tonight?” Francis asked this whenever someone bought flowers and condoms in the same transaction.
“How’d you know?” The customer smiled big, showing off the gap between his two front teeth.
Francis smiled too. She couldn’t help it.
The customer gave a wink and snorted into anxious laughter. Winking must have been out of character for him. No, I shouldn’t withhold. Winking was very much out of character for him, but he hadn’t been out with anyone since his wife died. They had met when he was fifteen. The customer’s skillset for dating had stopped evolving at a time in his life when he was still hiding Playboys under his mattress, and now he was in a strange new form of elderly adolescence that made his chest constrict. The customer had vowed that he was never going to date again, but last month a framed photo of his wife holding a trout had fallen to the ground and shattered. He took this to mean that his wife was telling him to move on. She wasn’t. The customer’s wife, Martha, was with me watching the whole interaction. She was pissed. Martha shouted that she should have chopped his dick off while she was still alive and kept calling him a bastard as she followed him out of the store.
“That guy was so sweet,” Alan said.
Francis was staring off into space, her eyebrows wrinkling and widening as if she was having a conversation.
“Everything okay, Fran?”
“Sorry,” Francis exhaled. “I just can’t stop thinking about the whole car keys thing.”
“Have you talked to Deb since it happened?”
“She hasn’t answered any of my calls.”
I couldn’t. My body was decomposing on the kitchen floor.
“I’m sorry, but that’s just so selfish. ”
“I was pretty harsh to her,” said Francis. “She acts like she’s fine, but we both know she’s a depressed cookie. She makes me look like I take care of myself.”
Francis was wearing the same black sweater and blue jeans that she had been wearing for the past four days, the dark sweater highlighting the flurries of dandruff on her shoulders.
“That’s pretty bad,” Alan smiled.
Francis hit his stomach. Alan smiled and wrapped his arms around her body, kissing her on the forehead before she managed to squirm free.
“A customer could see us,” Francis said.
“What customer? The place is dead.”
Alan reached to put his arms around her again.
“I’m really not in the mood.” Francis didn’t know why, but a thin film of tears glazed over her eyes.
“Aw, is somebody crying?” Alan smirked.
Francis said nothing, flipping Alan off as she walked away towards the breakroom.
“Where are you going?”
“Bathroom,” Francis said without looking back at him.
“Getting some tissues?” Alan grinned. I used to think that Alan was just an asshole, but after losing the barrier of my body, I could feel Alan’s nerves pushing out of him and pressing up against his swollen memories. Alan had no idea what to do when someone was crying around him; he didn’t have the vocabulary for it. As a child, Alan had only seen an adult cry once, a few days after his mother’s funeral. Alan had taken the week off from school. There was missing sound that had to be filled, so his dad put on the Wizard of Oz. His dad began watching the movie the same way he watched everything––with mild disinterest, but when Dorothy started singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Alan’s dad started to sob. He sobbed with all of himself, his whole body vibrating. His face was sheathed in mucus, and he clenched his arms against his chest in an attempt to steady himself. Watching his dad out of control like that made Alan feel helpless, like he had lost not one parent, but both.
Francis made her way back to the register, and Alan was relieved to see that her face had no remnants of tears, her eyes neither puffy nor red.
“Everything okay?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, I’m just feeling off. Maybe I’m depressed or something.”
“Don’t turn into your sister on me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You said it yourself. Even you look stable compared to her,” Alan’s voice was playful, “and your family has a pretty fucked mental history in general.”
Francis’s eyes narrowed in on him. Her thoughts were pungent and I sat in them like fog. She examined Alan’s brown eyes and bold jawline and tried to remember what she had felt when she had first decided to move in with him. Francis knew the linear history of their relationship, but her emotional memory was hollow, detached. She felt nothing.
“Come on. Don’t give me that look,” Alan said. “You started joking about it first.”
I had no idea that they had ever fought.
“Fran, please say something.”
“Sorry, it’s not you. I’m just stressed about Deb.” Francis was still upset. I was stretched by the tension she was withholding from him. In Francis’s mind, a bit of the monument she had built for Alan had chipped. Alan didn’t know it. She wanted Alan to understand the nuances of her emotions without having to teach him how to do it. She believed that communication between two people could only be genuine if it happened organically, if it was as effortless as breathing. Francis and I both had trouble communicating. That was why I had taken her car keys. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I wanted her to stay longer.
I had gotten fired from the law firm earlier that week. I invited Francis over for dinner so we could talk about it. I was hardly eating, but still, I had spent the whole day preparing our meal. When I would go to stir the squash soup, the smell jolted me away from my anxiety, from the law firm, from everything. All that was left was the warm scent and the throbbing pulse in my stomach.
“Jesus, it looks like your bones are inhaling your skin,” Francis said as she came through the door.
“I’m on a new diet.” I must have looked offended because her voice softened after that.
I had recently remodeled the house, so I showed Francis around before eating––the granite countertops, the hardwood floors, the Amish cabinets. Francis hardly said anything as I guided her from room to room.
“Don’t you like what I did with the place?” I finally asked her.
“Yeah, it’s nice.”
“Nice? I hired the best people in the area.”
“I guess home improvement just isn’t really my thing.”
“Aw, hon. Maybe you’ll understand it more once you can afford it.” I forced a smile.
I had Francis sit down while I set the table. She offered to help, but I didn’t want to let her see how disorganized the insides of the cabinets were.
“So I now know all about the house, but how are you?” Francis asked as we were eating.
“Amazing,” I couldn’t stop myself. “Everything has been really great.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.”
I smiled and held the spoon up to my lips, blowing on the hot soup before placing it back into the bowl. I did this throughout the meal, going through the motions of eating but avoiding taking actual bites.
While we were hugging goodbye, Francis asked to use the bathroom. She said that she had to leave early, but I still had so much to tell her. I waited until I heard the door shut before rummaging through her purse. It was one of those utilitarian bags with multiple dips and cubbies. After learning that the main pouch was empty, I found her keys nested in one of its side cavities. I cusped the keys in my jacket pocket, grazing my thumb up and down their cool, copper ridges.
When Francis came back from the bathroom, the first thing she did was grab her purse, shoving and shuffling until she noticed that her keys were gone. Instead of scanning the house, she asked if she could borrow my phone. Her phone was dead and she wanted to call Alan to ask if he could drop off her spare set. As I pulled my phone out from my jacket pocket, Francis’s keys fell to the ground. I panicked, accusing Francis of planting the keys there in the first place.
“You’re desperate for a reason to blame me for something,” I said. “You’ve always been jealous of how successful I am.”
“You know what, I held my tongue all of dinner while you bragged about bullshit after bullshit, but when it really comes down to it, I just feel sorry for you.” Francis’s body tightened. “You have no one.”
Francis stepped outside of the store for some air. She sat on a bench near the entrance and tried to call me, but the call went straight to voicemail.
As I followed Francis back into the store, I saw that I wasn’t alone. The other presence was a soft, expansive blue. Instead of having an individual set of memories, the person had melded into a larger collective. They had been dead for a while. As they hovered over Alan, their color shied to a misty purple. It was Alan’s mother. She circled around him slowly, almost as if she was hugging him. As she spun, she whispered, but there were too many voices speaking at once to discern what she was saying. She started to spiral faster and faster, going upwards. Once Francis made it to the register, Alan’s mother had already evaporated through the ceiling.
“Hey, can you cover for a sec?” Alan asked. “I need to take a shit.”
“I actually came in to tell you that I’m leaving early.”
“Everything okay? You’re not off ‘til nine.”
“Yeah, I just want to go check on Deb. Something feels off.”
“Do you need me to go with you?”
“I think I can handle it.”
I wanted so badly to yell at Francis and tell her not to go alone, but I knew that my voice wouldn’t reach her. When I slit my wrist open, I put a plastic bag down to protect the hardwood floors, but I didn’t think once about who would find my body.
I hated watching her drive to my house. She absently nodded to music from the radio, still believing that her worries were rooted in paranoia rather than truth. Part of me wanted to let her go on alone. I was afraid of seeing my dead body, of seeing Francis in pain, but also afraid of seeing that she was in no pain at all, of her looking at my corpse with apathy. I didn’t want to see any of it.
Newspapers were piled up on my doorstep and the grass in the front yard was overgrown. I had filed complaints on past neighbors for not keeping up with yard maintenance, but seeing the tall grass then, I couldn’t remember why it had bothered me so much. It looked so much softer than the neighboring lawns with their uniform buzzcuts, more welcoming.
Francis got out of the car and ran to the front door, taking the condition of my yard alone as reason for alarm.
She pounded on the door, but of course, no one answered.
“Deb!” she yelled, knocking harder. “It’s me, Francis. Deb, let me in. Deb!” She paced around the perimeter of the house, checking each window.
Not my bedroom, nor the den, but the bathroom––she found a slight crack in my bathroom window. The air was still.
She pressed her fingers under the opening and pulled it up as far it could go. As she tumbled into my bathroom, she started to gag and cough. It took me a second to figure out why she was coughing, my bathroom was immaculately clean.
“Oh, God.” Francis pulled her shirt up over her nose. I then realized that she was responding to the stench of my rotting body.
She followed the smell through the halls and into the kitchen. There I was.
Francis knelt down and stared doe-eyed at me, occasionally muttering unintelligible words. Her panic rumbled heavy in all directions, but it couldn’t reach me. I was watching a storm through a thick, glass window.
I looked at my body splayed out over the layers of trash bags, trying to feel some modicum of attachment. I was so cooped up in there. Splotches of brown blood puddled around my wrist, and my gaunt cheeks emphasized the hollowness in my eyes. The body was not as much me as it was a stagnant souvenir of the past, a snow globe from an uninspired vacation.