As specified in his will, when Harold Perkins died he was buried next
to the body of a twelve-year-old girl.
This is
not as surprising as it first appears. The girl is Harold’s older
sister, Faye, who died fifty years earlier and was buried in the old
cemetery next to the highway on-ramp in the town where he had grown
up.
What was
surprising, at least to Harold, was that he was aware this was happening.
After all, his massive heart attack had killed him nearly three days
ago, shouldn’t he be on his way to heaven by now?
X
X X
Somehow,
in the pitch-darkness, and even though his lids were sewn shut, Harold
could see.
He could
see the reddish-purple velvet that lined his coffin. He could count,
if he wanted to, each button that attached the velvet to the lid, and
each wrinkle and tuft created.
It wasn’t
much to look at, but Harold could see.
There
were many more things, however, he discovered he could not do.
He could
not shift into a more comfortable position or claw at the lid or stop
that knocking sound or––
He listened.
Nothing. Must have been something above ground. Or maybe it was more
akin to phantom pains; maybe his body missed his heartbeat.
To continue:
Harold
could not scream, or cry, or beg, or pray to God, and he found it mildly
amusing that he had no desire to do so. In fact, the only thing he wished
(and when alive certainly thought the dead capable of this) was to sleep.
He tried
and tried and tried ...
But Harold
could not sleep.
When alive,
he had measured and breathed deeply, calming himself to sleep gradually.
But having no breath or working lungs, he resorted to counting sheep.
He counted
and counted and counted ...
Harold
counted sheep for a decade.
He counted
sheep long past the point where the thing that was once Harold remembered
what a sheep was, or used numbers for counting, or even remembered why
he had begun doing whatever it was he was doing.
The first
five years or so Harold’s mind had wandered off onto any series
of tangents (so maybe it isn’t fair to claim he counted sheep for
the entire decade), but sooner than he would’ve guessed, he had
exhausted and forgotten everything he was capable of thinking.
This might
have surprised or even frightened Harold, but of course by then his
mind didn’t work like that.
So he
kept right on counting.
Halfway
through the third decade of counting and staring at the ceiling he no
longer even saw, something moved over Harold’s narrow window of
sight.
He could not be sure how long it had been inching itself across him,
how long he had been staring at it in unfocus.
But there
it was, something tangible, something that existed outside the control
and loss of his old, tired mind.
Something
that moved.
Harold
became frustrated. Years and years spent abstracting everything into
a single convenient nothingness, spoiled by this ... thing moving across
his space.
It was
about then that Harold realized he could feel it moving. It’s tiny
legs, up and down, side to side.
But from
what perspective?
Surely
his lack of any flesh could not feel anything, but what was the alternative?
It was ridiculous to think he had assumed the bug’s perspective
and felt––
Bug! He
thought. You’re a bug!
Harold
screamed in his mind as it crawled from his line of sight.
I NAME
YOU BUG!
X
X X
The bug
had long since left Harold’s single cemetery plot, but to his renewed
fascination, the bond with the bug had not been broken when visual contact
had ceased.
From the
bug’s point of view, Harold had crawled down and over his own tattered
remains, through a crack in the lining, a splinter in the wood, and
into the cool soil and green grass, with sunlight baking down.
With distance,
the bond had faded, but Harold was confident that he could forge another
one, just as soon as the next bug came along. He would just have to
be wait.
So Harold
waited, for eighty years, but this time it wasn’t an insect that
made contact.
X
X X
The root
was young, impatient and tenuous. It had been working on pushing through
Harold’s coffin for nearly a decade.
It finally
got through, snatching one of his teeth with it, as it pushed further
into the ground.
Harold
decided you don’t have to stay anywhere forever, and left the ground
and the grave to became the young oak. Over the next two hundred years
he grew to well over three hundred feet tall.
As the
seasons changed, and the leaves died and grew again, his spores and
seeds fell, growing.
Harold
became a grove.
He was
content in this state for six hundred years.
But one
spring day there was a growling.
Still
a ways away, it had yet to reach anything under Harold’s influence,
but the sound bothered him. It’s implications were vaguely familiar.
He knew
he had once been something else and somehow had become the trees and
vegetation, but he also knew he had been the trees far longer than anything
else, long enough to forget how to escape before the growling reached
him.
He had
other tricks, though, and he grew thistles and thick twisting vines
and dense, hard bark, attempting to wall out the growling.
But the
men came and the machines cut him and removed him. They processed him
and shaped him and sent him away. They stretched him and stapled him
and glued him and covered him.
Harold
became a house.
X
X X
As the
grove, Harold had been content with the cycles and the quiet that it
became near to the sleep he had been longing for.
He realized
none of this consciously, of course, he couldn’t think in such
terms anymore, nor did he have anything that resembled memory.
Harold
only knew that being a house was loud and different and he wanted it
to stop.
He wanted
to feel the air again. See the sun and taste the rain. But he was covered
with shingles, siding, paint, and glass. He was cut off from the earth,
separated by a slab of concrete. He was not living trees, but dead wood.
He was trapped, but it would not always be this way.
One day,
the grass of the lawn or the branch of a tree or the moss and vine would
connect him again and he would leave this house and its bustling occupants.
He didn’t
remember how he did it last time, but he remembered he had to wait.
So he waited.
X
X X
Even though
he only waited eight years (a blink to him now) he felt he has waited
too long. The occupants were too diligent, keeping the grass cut and
hedges trimmed.
But roots
again saved him. A willow, this time, snaked through the foundation
and touched him.
The first
thing Harold did was tear out the windows and doors, blocking the openings
with thick trunks. He replaced the carpets with grass and weeds, the
wallpaper and plaster with vines and moss. He peeled the siding and
mulched the shingles.
The occupants
were frightened and huddled together in the attic, but he was not done
with them.
He found
intestinal flora in the digestive tract of the largest one and accelerated
its growth.
It clutched
its mid-region and doubled over as Harold clogged it’s organs with
vegetable matter. It tried to vomit, but roots and leaves spilled from
it’s throat, then nose, then eyes and anus.
The openings
weren’t big enough to contain the pressure, and the man’s
skin split. Useless pieces of him hung from the tree that now grew in
the middle of the attic. A tree shaped like a man.
The smallest
one cried, leaking salty water, and in his elemental state Harold welcomed
the water for nourishment, tiny flowers sprouting wherever her tears
fell. He took hold of the rest of the family with twisted, knotted vines
and began to squeeze ...
But ...
... but
...
... the
smallest one reminded him of something ... someone, long lost and Harold
stopped and tried to remember who. As he focused, he heard a rhythmic
knocking on the wood where the front door had been. A rhythm he had
once believed to be inside him.
Curious
and somehow expectant, he parted the wood and there she stood, seemingly
bathed in moonlight in the middle of the afternoon, hovering a few inches
from the ground, holding out her hand.
His sister,
Faye.
I tried
knocking before, she said without opening her mouth. But you did not
answer.
I ...
thought ... I don’t know how ... Thought it was my heartbeat ...
imagination running around ... I ignored it and tried to sleep ...
She shook
her head slowly.
You cannot
try some things, they just happen, she said. But no matter. Nine hundred
years is nothing to eternity.
Harold
left the wood and took her hand.
He slept
deeply for a long time.
