"I just couldn't resist."
"Only sacred things deserve to be messed with."
It all ended with a dead kid near the train tracks.
Six years later, the story repeats itself and two long-forgotten friends might find out that when death tries to play match...
- Oh don't you wonder when the light begins to fade? And the clock just makes the colors turn to grey -
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
One day, at the age of 6 years old, I woke up with the urge to experience what it would be like to be dead.
I walked in the casket showroom on the first floor of my house and looked around at all the coffins, thinking about how comfortable they looked and what it would feel like to be stuck in one of them forever. They slightly resembled baby cradles, and I thought it was logical our first bed and our last were somewhat similar.
So I got my wooden stool from the kitchen, the one I used to help my mom cut vegetables, and climbed up the display to lay in one of the caskets. I made myself comfortable, rolling around and using the head-pillow that was there, and I realized I was pretty warm and cozy, so I fell asleep.
Thirty minutes later, my mom found me there.
Useless to explain she didn't like the prank at all. She screamed bloody murder, I cried, my dad yelled, it wasn't pretty.
That was the beginning of the end.
A year later, my mom left.
She divorced my dad, saying she had enough of all that death stuff, that she felt like she was dying in there, that she was too young to waste her life in a funeral home. She tried to bring me with her, saying a little girl shouldn't be away from her mother, but in the end, a judge was the one to decide.
My mom and New York or my dad and Dirkwood in a funeral home.
The judge gave full custody to my dad, as crazy as it sounds, and I was relieved by this decision. I didn't mind the cadavers in the basement, the gravestones, and the caskets, and I knew, even at the age of seven, that my mom would be fine alone but that my dad wouldn't.
I also had a life in Dirkwood. I was already in elementary school and I had that weird friend named Taehyung that I quite liked even if his sisters sometimes pulled my braids. I was happy.
My mom still managed to hijack me every year for a few weeks in New York during summertime, but I never liked it there; too many people, too noisy, too fast. I didn't have any friends and felt like everyone was snobbish over the small-town girl.
"Sage, could you come here a minute!" my dad chimes from downstairs and I throw out my pencil on my desk, gazing up the window with the feeling I'm going to see Taehyung appear, just like a few days ago when he suddenly materialized in front of my window.
"I'm coming!"
I'm almost certain I dreamed it.
However, I can recall every detail of his figure, contrasting against the black asphalt, just like if he was still there before my eyes. He was wearing the academy uniform, backpack slung on his shoulder, a look of pure dismay written on his face. His hands were shaking, chest heaving, and cheeks slightly flushed like he had been running a few seconds before. In the little patch of brightness my window was providing, his face looked ghostly , plumped lips directed downward in a scowl, eyes distressed.
