Raise the Dead

Last October, I had a (very) short Halloween-themed story published on a napkin and distributed through cafés around Brisbane care of the rather exceptional Tiny Owl Workshop. I've been meaning to post it on here for quite a while but am prone to fits of failness. Anyway, here's Raise the Dead.

Raise the Dead
She comes back the summer of ‘09, with the earth in her hair and beneath the half-moons of her nails. Her wedding dress filthy and torn up from the last time, the bullet hole in her chest deep and black. She is drinking a gin and tonic and has reapplied red lipstick on her thin, dead lips.

“The old haunt,” she says when she sees him. She grins, and a chunk of flesh at her cheek falls off. She kicks it beneath the couch.

“I still don’t know how you sit in that dress,” he replies, because she had insisted on a flaring, princess skirt for the wedding and what else is there to say? He contemplates telling her that he’s remarried since the last time, but then he doubts she missed the photos in the hall and the highchair in the kitchen. All the children’s channels in their Foxtel package.

He sits beside her and she takes another drink. The liquid oozes out the side of her mouth.

“Which is this?”

“Gypsy curse.”

The last time was voodoo. She’d had more of a taste for flesh then and had tried to eat her sister. When they’d put her back in the ground, she had become herself again; however briefly, and complained about the laziness of gen y. They never think to localise raising the dead, she said, and always wail like wet cats when more than one of us wakes up.

“Kids,” her sister replied, clutching at her shovel and bleeding from the neck. They’d buried his wife alive and she, always the martyr, had let them.  

“How long will it last?” he asks now, and watches her purse her lips, shrug.

“However long it takes them to break it, I guess.”

“Huh,” he says, then gestures to her glass. “Top up?”

--

Sophie Overett is a Brisbane writer. This is her second story featuring a dead woman in a wedding dress. She hopes it isn’t a trend. @SophieOverett