Three Days Dead

Day One

Aquarius Jonas was the girl that kept the boys looking and the ladies gossiping. Like a mid summer breeze, she blew in to my small Indiana town from Portland with wild blue hair and a body like a canvas. When she looked at you a person could see stars in her eyes, and when she smiled, the world seemed to stop. But such pleasures were only for a moment because Aquarius wasn’t a girl to shower affections on anyone for too long; that made her smirks and quirks all the more valuable.

At least that was how I always saw it. For too long it seemed like my whole school day revolved around the need for that one earth-stopping-heart-skipping look. Other guys had it bad, but not like me. With a life with nothing but dead ends down the road, she was like a sailboat and sea come into the desert. We spoke rarely, but those brief encounters left me feeling like I could fly.

So when she died, I fell apart like an unstrung set of glass beads. I was lost and broken and missing all at once. All that life and magic gone in one night when a truck too old to be worth anything breaks down and skids over the side of bridge, deep into the river. She drowned in a mess of starlight and steel, unconscious since impact.

What was the point in waking up now? I thought to myself. I felt like I was fumbling with the broken bits of myself, trying to fix something, to restring beads without a string.

But that was three days ago, and that was before I remembered.

Three days after they put her in the ground and buried her, I visited the Peddler of St. Mary’s. Every graveyard has a Peddler, but only odd people like me, people who can see things that shouldn’t be there, can see and talk with a Peddler. Once or twice in the past I had traded something with the Peddler for two to three days with a deceased buried in his graveyard.

I didn’t deal with Peddlers often because they were unsettling and too expensive. Sometimes they will deal for a bargain, like a baby tooth or braids of unwanted hair, but often they ask for memories, secrets, or dreams, things you can never get back; that, or pain, the currency they called tithe.

“Who are you here for, boy?” he asked, tipping back his top hat and staring down his nose at me. He smiled like a cat with cream when he saw my determination.

“Aquarius Joans. What will that cost?”

“More than a molar, I can tell you that much.” The peddler sat back on the headstone of a man and pondered. Something like a lizard with wings slithered out from under his hat to drop a long thin card in gold detail onto his shoulder before scurrying back under the hat. The peddler smiled, picking it up. “My, what an expensive lady. You’ll owe me a memory and a small tithe. As happy as your memory, the pain must be just as great.”

Of course, he only took happy memories. Bad memories were cheap, and sometimes you could sell a whole bunch of them for something, but not for someone like Aquarius.

“And that’s for three days with her?” I asked, reaching for the card.

The peddler grinned. “Of course, still interested? You haven’t even asked how much the tithe will hurt.”

“I don’t care,” I grumbled, reaching out and snatching the card.

The moment my fingerprint touch the paper the feeling of being sucker punched knocked me off my feet. I saw a wisp of my memory, and then it was gone, leaving me bruised and coughing up blood on the headstones. My body was wracked again, and again, and again, and then once more, leaving me crippled. Nothing focused, and before I knew it, someone was pulling me up off the headstones and towards the road.

“You okay, kid?” a teacher I had in third grade asked. She didn’t even recognize me.

“Fine,” I coughed, shrugging her off and stomping home as she shouted at my retreating back.