Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman
Harrows, situated at the northernmost point of the Trail, savored its distance from the meat of the rabid road. It was easily the most affluent town in both counties; the homes of Harrows were larger, often constructed of stately stone, some with as many as ten bedrooms. The garden yards were as wide as the fabled Trail itself, some roofs as high as the willows. Even better: Harrows enjoyed more sunlight than the other towns, as the shadows cast by the arching of those willows concluded where the wheat fields began, just south of the border. Sunny and secluded, remote and rich, Harrows was a very desirable place to live.
But that didn’t preclude its citizens dying.
John Bowie found this out the bad way.
“One of a kind,” Carol Evers said, standing beside her husband, Dwight, looking into the open grave of her friend John Bowie. The tears in her eyes reflected the unboxed man below.
One of Harrows’s most likable men, Bowie was a very funny thinking-man who added to every affair he attended. His lively eyes often smiled behind his thick glasses, and his ceaseless appetite was welcomed by all who had spent an afternoon cooking for a party.
John Bowie was a good man.
John Bowie was a fun man.
John Bowie was also a homosexual who posed no threat to Dwight Evers, Bowie being the closest friend Carol had.
For this, Bowie was the only person outside her husband whom Carol had told of her lifelong condition.
It wasn’t an easy thing for her to reveal.
And yet it had come out of her, so easily, one clear evening on the back porch of her and Dwight’s home. John had been discussing books and magic tricks, two of his most profound interests, when Carol suddenly rose from the bench and told him.
I’ve died before, John. Many times.
Though famous for a healthy sense of humor, John wasn’t one to take such a statement lightly. And Carol’s green eyes often betrayed when she was serious.
Tell me, he’d said, his boots resting upon a wooden stool, his body hunched in a wicker chair. It was Carol’s favorite posture he assumed. Perhaps that was what loosened her lips. Tell me about every single time.
And Carol did tell John Bowie about every time she’d died, every time she could remember. The doctors, she said, had no name for her condition. But she’d come up with one of her own many years ago.
Howltown, she’d said. That’s what I started calling it around age eight. I guess I was influenced by the names of the Trail-towns. The only places I knew of. And it is something of a town. To me. No sheriff, of course. No boardwalk, no bank, no booze. No nothing. But it’s a place, here on the Trail, all the same. Even if I’m the only one who visits. She’d paused. John noticed an odd combination of expressions on her face; Carol was both recalling her youth, when she named her coma, and despairing that it still existed. To someone outside the coma, she continued, I appear…dead. Hardly a heartbeat. Far from fogging a mirror. And a pulse as slow as a slug. There’s no light in there, John. I can hear the world around me, but I can’t move. And the wind in there…it howls. So…Howltown. Pretty neat, huh?
She told John how afraid she once was of the isolation of the coma. How her mother Hattie’s constant tinkering in the workroom acted as an anchor to reality. Without Hattie, I’d have broken in there. Gone mad.
She told him of the hoarse breathing that acted as music in Howltown. And how Hattie said it must be Carol’s own. She told John about the falling sensation, too.
From the second it starts, I’m falling. I fall into the coma and I don’t touch ground until I wake.
John could see the relief in the face of his brilliant friend as she spoke. Carol, John knew, hadn’t told anybody but Dwight. She was embarrassed over it, he surmised, convinced that her condition would be considered a burden and send most running. Carol had intimated that someone had run from her before. John listened closely and had ideas of his own. And as he spoke Carol realized why she had suddenly decided to confide in someone other than her husband. It wasn’t only for safety’s sake, though that played a major part, for what if Dwight were to die while Carol was inside the coma? Who would know that she still lived?
But telling John Bowie had just as much to do with Carol’s desire to hear what he thought of it.
John had many things to say. John was as bright as Howltown was dark.
And now John Bowie was dead.
Lying barefoot in a gray suit on the bumpy dirt six feet beneath Carol’s yellow shoes, John had been taken by the Illness, knew his death was afoot, and had asked for no box. Carol herself had seen to it that her naturalist friend, Harrows’s resident pantheist, would decay the way he wanted to.
Directly into the dirt.
“He looks a bit like he…fell right into the hole,” Dwight whispered to Carol, the couple shoulder-to-shoulder. Carol’s yellow dress flapped in a breeze that didn’t seem to reach her husband’s black suit.
“It’s what he wanted,” Carol whispered. And her voice sounded much older than the thirty-eight years she was.
The funeral director Robert Manders stood at a podium at the head of Bowie’s grave, telling the grievers what they already knew. “A brilliant mind, an enthusiast, a thirst for knowledge in all subjects…”
Carol thought of John performing simple magic tricks at parties. Making olives vanish. Pulling plums from the ears of drunk women. She tried to smile but couldn’t bring herself to do it.