Temple aka Sarah Mary Williams (afuriousrage) wrote in zombieslogs, @ 2013-11-24 10:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | isaac lahey, temple |
Who: Temple and Open
What: Haunting up the place
Where: Main Street
When: Now
Warnings: Talk about death but she’s a ghost so you know. Terrible English. Sorry about that folks but Temple hasn’t had much in the way of education.
Notes: Moses dialogue is lifted straight from The Reapers Are The Angels
“She didn’t deserve to die so light,” Moses Todd explained. “Dying oughta have a design the same as living.”
Those were the first words Temple heard when her spirit floated back into the living room where Maury and Moses were having a chat like a couple of old hens gossiping over a pot of tea. Only difference was that Maury couldn’t talk back, never had the whole long lonely time Temple had known him.
“Dang it, Mose. I reckon the inheritor of the earth already solved your problem. You were too slow, getting old and it’s showing. Don’t be taking it out on Maury here. He ain’t nothin’ but a dummy. He never hurt no one, no sir. Not even a fly.”
“What you got there?” Moses asked Maury who was fiddling around with some matter of thing that Temple hadn’t ever seen before. It was a small glass dome with a thing that might have been like a flower inside it. What a strange world they lived in when two little girls laid dead out on the lawn not more than thirty minutes past and now one of them was contemplating how it was possible for someone to stick a rose in a little glass dome. She reckoned the rose would die but it had withstood the test of time better than Mr. and Mrs. Duchamp had anyhow. It must have had a reason to keep going, Temple reasoned. Like them slugs outside. Even they had a reason to keep on going even if it was to only consume the earth until they swallowed every last little speck of dust right up.
Maury handed the dome over to Moses.
“What’d you do that for, Dummy?!” Temple demanded.
“Pretty,” Moses remarked as he looked it over.
“Mose, I know you can hear me. You’re gonna quit this foolishness now before I reach into your body and yank your spirit free. I ain’t sure on the particulars of being a ghost but I’ll bet I can poltergeist me up something real scary. I mean it, Mose. You leave Maury alone,” Temple threatened.
“You want to know something?” Moses asked, his eyes firmly glued to Maury as they saw right through the ghost of Temple. “I had a girl of my own once. Her name was Lily like the flower. Her mother, she took her to Jacksonville in a caravan. I was supposed to meet them there, but they never showed up. The whole caravan, it just disappeared. I spent two years driving those roads back and forth between Orlando and Jacksonville. Two years of looking for something, you being to see it everywhere. Lily in her mother’s arms, like ghosts. Behind every billboard. Just around every damn corner. It got so bad I had to stop looking. The abundance of gone things, it’ll bury you.”
Temple froze, caught in the history of the present and how it could make a person feel like they were tearing apart from the inside even if they weren’t a person at all anymore. Vague memories, flashes of a bus, her mother’s voice. Malcolm. The brother she had adopted as her own even though the orphanage had lost all of the documents on who belonged to who a long time ago. Lily, like a flower. The dam inside of Temple split open and tears threatened but didn’t fall. People like Temple, people like ol Mose over there didn’t deserve to cry. Crying was like emptying your regrets into a private river filled with loathing. People like Temple and Moses didn’t cry. Their regrets were sticky like putty gumming up the works, slowly blackening them day by day. Temple wouldn’t cry. Not now, not ever.
Whatever Moses said next had been lost on Temple, all wound up like a ball of yarn trying to untwist and untwine herself. Moses couldn’t see her but Maury could, he looked straight at her and she said nothing, did nothing. Ain’t nothing to be done but hope that God could recognize one of his children in the old dummy. When she found Maury he had been running with his dead grandma in his arms, a hundred hungry snarling meatskins behind him looking for a fresh meal. Maury hadn’t washed blood from his hair, hadn’t scrubbed it from underneath his fingernails the way that Temple had, the way that Moses had. Maury was clean and Temple reckoned that meant something in the eyes of God. She gave him what might have passed for a reassuring look, convinced that once Moses was done unburdening hisself that he would go ahead and shoot Maury between the eyes too. You have to aim for the head less you have another hungry meatskin on your hands later on.
“Well,” Moses said. “I reckon you and this are my inheritance.”
“What?” Temple asked, confused as she followed Moses and Maury outside.
“It’s time to light out,” Moses said to Maury. “We’re heading north and there ain’t any point in waitin’ on the dead.”
It took them a full two weeks to make their way from Point Comfort, Texas to Niagra Falls. During those two weeks Temple learned a lot about what a ghost could and couldn’t do exactly. She knew she couldn’t be seen by Moses or the few travelers he crossed along his travelers. Maury seemed to be able to catch a glimpse of him here and there but he was feeble minded and couldn’t communicate. One night by accident Temple slipped inside of old Moses’s dreams. She thought he would be dreaming about guns and cars and meatskins and the gritty kind of violence that could wipe a man’s mind clean. She thought he would be dreaming about Abraham, maybe something nice to show Temple that the man she had killed wasn’t all monster. She wanted to see something nice about Moses’s brother because he was the reason that Temple was dead at all. These Southern boys just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their kin so they can get themselves a righteous vendetta to follow. But Moses wasn’t dreaming of his brother, or zombies or the inheritors of the earth. He was dreaming about her, about Lily, a little girl he had let slip from his grasp fifteen years ago.
Temple didn’t care for this dream and so she confronted ol’ Mose right there and then, telling him how he had inherited Maury and he had best take care of the dummy or else she was going to haunt him all the way to his grave. Moses didn’t give into her banterins for a few nights but when he finally did he slept better than he had in a week.
She stood motionless beside Maury, his hands gripping the rusty metal rail sunk into rock as they look over God’s great mystery. Niagra Falls was like the earth turned inside out and was feeding its own wide gullet. So much water, more water than Temple had ever imagined possible. Moses hefted the barrel with Temple’s body in it that had been stinking up the trunk of his car for days. A thin layer of mist covered his and Maury’s skin.
She had never been to Niagra Falls in her whole dang life but she had always dreamed about it. Once in a different lifetime, when wonders were rare and announced. Now they were everywhere, for the delectation of those among the survivors who might be hunters of miracles. And the beauty they looked over is fathomable only by a girl who would have felt the measure of it as deep as to her dazzled soul.
As Maury and Moses took in the wonderment of the falls, Temple wandered away from them. A whining like sound that came straight from his soul escaped from Maury and Temple turned back to look. His big dark eyes were sad and filled with a child’s hope.
“Can’t stay with you anymore, Maury. It ain’t fit for the living to mix with the dead. Not even in this world. Stay with Mose and do what he tells you to do and one day this’ll all be over and you and me will be up in heaven, God’s creatures. We’ll meet again, Maury. Maybe up in heaven and you can tell me a story or two. Won’t that be something?”
She smiled at that idea, the thought that maybe she would meet Maury up in heaven and they would finally be able to communicate. Maury didn’t speak and Temple didn’t read or write but that hadn’t stopped her from taking him in. Tears threaten to break their seal just like the falls in Niagra but Temple held them in. Heaven wasn’t going to wait for her but she had no doubts that Maury would be there one day, maybe telling stories, maybe just as feeble minded as he had been here on earth. Temple didn’t know but she knew one thing. There was a reason she was here and not up in heaven with them other good folk.
“Bye, Maury.” She gave him a final wave and turned away from him before she really did break her own doggone rule and start crying like a fool.
She could feel the rush of water behind her as she wondered why her spirit had been stuck here instead of going on up to heaven so she could be with Malcolm again. But then she reckoned that Malcolm might be part of the reason she was stuck here. She closed her eyes and thought about Iron Giants and airplanes rushing through the creative mind of a young boy with his arm sticking out the car window as Temple drove. Aeronauticals, Temple had explained. That was how airplanes worked, how they stayed up in the sky just like angels but filled with bolts and metal and mystery.
I mean I guess I been around meatskins too long. Sometimes it happens where I’ll lose it. Like a switch gets flicked somewhere in my brain, you know? And then my hands’ll start rippin and tearin and they don’t care about the whys or wherefores. And it’s wrong, it’s a sin as big as the world we live in, bigger even to lay your hands on a creation of God’s and snuff it out. It don’t matter how ugly a thing it is, it’s a sin, and God will send a terrible vengeance down on you for it. I know, I seen it. But the truth is- the truth is I don’t know where I got off on the wrong track. Moses, he says I ain’t evil but then if I ain’t evil then what am I? Cause my hands, see, they ain’t seem to got no purpose except when they’re bashin in a skull or slittin a throat. That’s the whole, all around truth of the matter. Them meatskins, they kill- but they ain’t get any satisfaction out of it. Maury, you sure are wanderin a lonely earth, full of breach and befoulment, but the real abomination is sittin’ right next to you.
Once she had traveled a good distance from Moses and Maury, Temple dropped to her knees. She expected the grit of sand and stone beneath her but she felt nothing. There had been nothing to feel since she had died outside of Moses’s dreams. She still didn’t cry, refused to cry but she is ready for penance, for punishment. Temple was ready to be cast down asunder to fiery damnation, she knew that God had to keep a balance in the universe and giving Temple a free pass for her sins would be a blaspheme of the world and everything that floated around it.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted to the sky. “I’M SORRY!”
Only stony silence returned Temple’s pleas for forgiveness. God had no room for the sorry because everybody was sorry about something in their lives, it was more about what you did to prove that you were sorry, just saying it meant nothing at all. Temple had told a million years and she could say that she was alive but that didn’t make it true. It took more than words to appease a greater power. It took a true kind of penance from a clean soul and Temple wasn’t clean. Ol Mose was wrong. She wasn’t going to be with the angels.
Days of waft and wayfaring lead Temple to Everett. She had never been to the American Northwest before. Despite her wandering spirit she had spent most of her life traveling up and down the southeast coast of the United States. She had only gone to Texas to deliver Maury to his relatives who had gone and killed themselves before Temple and Maury even arrived, even before ol Mose came around. A girl could sure enough cover some ground in this life (and death). Temple bet she still had places to go that she didn’t even know existed yet.
She sang to keep herself company as she walked aimlessly along Main Street in Everett.
She was light and like a fairy,
And her shoes was number nine.
Herring boxes without topses
Was sandals for that Clementine.
Drove her ducklins to the water
Every morning just at nine
Hit her foot against a splinter
Fell into the foamin brine
Ruby lips above the water
Blowing bubbles clear and fine
But alas I weren’t no swimmer
Neither was my Clementine
In a churchyard near the canyon
Where the murple do entwine
Grow some rosies and some posies
Fertilized by Clementine
In my dreams she still doth haunt me
Robed in garments soaked with brine
Then she rises from the waters
And I kiss my Clementine
How I missed her, how I missed her
How I missed my Clementine
Till I kissed her little sister
And forgot my Clementine