The Bodies
Tiny Hauntings Fiction
By Abigail Myers (Haunter) & Zaire “Mickey” Lott (Architect)
The house sat on a dusty lot that must have been well-kept once: wicker porch furniture covered with silt, a few shriveled privet shrubs, garden gnomes with paint fading and peeling. A thick roll of yellow CRIME SCENE——DO NOT CROSS tape held the door ajar.
I fastened an N95 mask over my nose and mouth, slipped disposable covers over my boots, and snapped on gloves before I went inside. Despite the stagnant air, the house itself breathed. It was in the way the peeling wallpaper swayed, the way the warped floorboards swelled and creaked under my feet. The flies, emitting a low, constant buzz, blocked out beams of sunlight as they swarmed on the ceiling, single minded black masses moving across the walls. Even through my mask, I could tell that a sweet, sticky smell clung to the air——the flies were well fed.
Your face still smiling at me from the lock screen, I snapped a few photos with my phone, plucked samples from the bodies and dropped them into test tubes, took measurements from the air and the sediment on the floor.
Their faces, the man and the woman, weren’t yet too consumed to make out——well into their eighties at minimum. They both looked like they’d simply fallen asleep. I imagined that they’d just grown too old to look after the house, that one looked after the other and that was all they had the energy to do.
I know, better than most people, that in the end we’re all bodies. Still, if this couldn’t be us, entwined in the final slumber at the end of a long life, I wish your body could have met a different fate, one I don’t visit regularly in my nightmares, the ones I never had before you left.
Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Recent work appears with BULL, Stanchion, HAD, and JMWW, and is forthcoming with Amethyst Review and Tangled Locks.
Zaire "Mickey" Lott is a black lesbian writer with one amazing title under her belt, Validate: Stuggling Singles in Your Area, alongside various fanfiction titles they're not going to share with you.
