Savannah Knight is a retired mortician with great plans to become a paranormal author. On her first day of retirement, she heads to the local library to start her new career as an aspiring author. But shortly after her first research session, everyo...
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When dealing with dead bodies, it wasn't the bodies I had issues with—it was dealing with what was left of their lives. I preferred a canvas that had died of natural causes, of course. All the lives they had to lead had been all used up by the time I touched the coldness of their skin. In my line of work, I had no choice as to who would live and who would die. That was in someone else's hands.
It was the unnatural causes that took me years to get used to. Though we weren't given the police reports, I could tell the moment I stepped into my office that something vile had happened to whoever was lying on that table. The smell of their foulness escaped every pore of the victims' bodies, it crept through the walls, and it punched you right in the face with its unwelcomed handshake.
If I'd opened my eyes—really opened them—I'd forget how to maintain my numbness when I dealt with those poor souls. My lack of feeling was certainly the most valuable skillset I'd acquired as a mortician. But at least once a year, something would get in there and force me to really see what I was looking at.
Her name was Riley Johnson, and she'd died at the young age of twelve. She was the first adolescent suicide victim I'd ever laid my eyes on, and she would haunt me for the rest of my career. My predilection toward the eyes of my canvas might have been my downfall that day because her story seemed to pour from them with such a violent nature that even a volcano couldn't match their power.
I imagined her eyes full of life with a rich brown color that reminded me of bathing my bare feet in the cold dirt as a child. At least, that's how they had to look when she was alive—before humanity took a cruel turn on her innocent heart. But that first look on her dead body told a different story. That day, her eyes turned as black as the secrets her body hid from the world.
As I surveyed the injuries on her body, one fact rang true—she had drowned in some body of water, probably a local lake or pond. Of course, that didn't automatically tell me why she died, why she chose to succumb to the pain and take her own life. It simply gave me a picture of what her last moments might have been like. (It was really her eyes that echoed the unforgiveness of her suicide.)
Little Riley Johnson, a proud girl scout, obedient daughter, and budding adolescent poet, walked home alone on the last day of sixth grade at East Hills Elementary School. To her, it had been the day she'd looked forward to all year long because she was finally free from the daily torment she endured at the hands of her homeroom bully. Riley was too quiet, too different, too weird, too smart, and—if none of that is enough—she had the wrong skin color. Jealousy is such a funny thing for adolescent girls. When you're perceived as having too much of a good thing, you become inherently bad only because the lie is much easier to handle than the truth.
With a smile on her face and a dream in her heart, she walked her normal route home—along the railroad tracks and behind the new residential area her family had recently moved into. But navigating this back way home was sometimes tricky. She had to cut through an open field where an abandoned house lay in her path.
The stories about this house were epic. Some of her classmates said it had been haunted for many years. While others said it wasn't abandoned at all—that there were a group of hillbilly terrorists living there, lying in wait for their opportunity to overthrow the government. Either were ridiculous theories, to say the least, but she couldn't deny her love for an outrageous story.
She'd never gotten close enough to the house to investigate what went on inside, but that last day of elementary school, she decided to grow some bravery. Pacing back and forth in front of the broken windows, she worked her way up to trying the doorknob. When she finally did, it opened with ease, but she was not alone. Upon walking inside, she saw a familiar face—an adult neighbor who had been their local ice cream man since she was much younger. She interrupted something she didn't understand, which had been the nail in her tiny coffin.
I can't (I won't) go into the details revealed in the courtroom three years later, but I can say that he did unspeakable things to that poor girl. When she left the house, there was nothing about her that resembled life. She knew she couldn't tell anybody about what had happened, but she also knew she couldn't live with the secret. So, she took out a fresh notebook and wrote one sentence that told her story:
It only gets worse from here.
She dropped the notebook on the ground, took her clothes off, and jumped into the warm water of the pond behind the abandoned house. With no fight in her to survive, she had breathed her last breath within minutes of her final swim. Her clothes, her notebook, and her backpack lay on the ground there for two weeks until the girl who lived next door—an ex-friend who was only a year younger than her— caught a sight of her body in the water. She didn't touch any of Riley's belongings—she ran like hell to tell her mother that the search for Riley Johnson had ended. She floated face up in a pond that was less than a five-minute walk from her home.
After the trial, the owner of the property, who was neither a ghost or a hillbilly terrorist, destroyed the dilapidated house and sold his acreage to a real estate developer. To this day, that lot remains empty.
Nobody told that story at her funeral—they only celebrated her life and mourned the future she might have had. It's possible she could have cured cancer or solved the homeless problem in her small community—or maybe she could have been an active shooter in the library I sat in that day. The world will never know her true power. Riley Johnson will never know how many assaulted, abused, and bullied girls she could have given a voice to.
I don't say that to pass on the guilt to those who are suffering but to pass on the guilt to those who might have caused or perpetuated that suffering. Is anyone's pathology ever our fault? I won't go so far as to say that, but I do think we've grown to be a society who still doesn't care about suicide victims.
