Mostly Dead Girls

She's Only Mostly Dead

Death hurt. Not just dying, although that had been particularly bad—Death hurt, the state of being 'dead'. It wasn't at all peaceful, and Dorita might have been concerned about her other dead relatives if she didn't know that being a 'dead girl' was rather different than the norm of death. So she just went ahead and felt sorry for herself, and jealous of whatever afterlife the other dead people were getting.

Her body was with her, for a certain value of 'with'. She dripped, and she was pretty sure she stank, but her nose felt constantly full of water. She had to breathe through her mouth, and it felt like lifting weights with her lungs. Every thin thread of air took a workout to get down her throat, turning her breathing into a constant wet hhhhh, hhhhh. Bright light hurt her eyes.

But after the initial misery, Dorita had warmed to the idea of not being all dead. She dragged herself out of the buried cistern—sliding up through the earth like a slick white root, clawing rocks out of the way with ragged nails—and sat in the twilight yard, breathing a little deeper than she had before. She'd been hiding in the cistern since she'd seen the strange man killed up in the house (about three weeks, she guessed, but couldn't be sure) and the killer seemed to be gone now. His energy had been very distinct—dry and on the rotten end of sweet, if she had to put a taste to it—and she couldn't feel a drop of it in the air. The other girl was still around, but quiet. Dorita was glad of that. The other girl scared her, in a way she felt was embarrassing for someone who was an avenger from beyond the grave. She didn't talk at all, or write, or bang on the walls and make the lights flicker. She either sat around as a bag or did whatever the killer told her to do.

There were lights up in the house. Dorita watched them for a minute, squinting. Were there people in the house again?Either it was a ghost-hunting show or the real estate people were doing a great cover-up job. And something else was off; the yard was different. Patchy grass, dry sandy earth and lavender plants had been replaced by thick weeds and tall, bowing stalks of white flowers she didn't recognize. The air was cooler and the soil under her fingers damp and rich.

She slipped back into her cistern. There were still traces of the New Mexico soil on the outer walls, only empathizing how different the ground was now. Had she been moved? Had the whole house been moved, when she hadn't been paying attention? She had been losing control of her perception—when she felt scared or sad she just wanted to curl up into a ball and lose herself in strange dreamless sleep, and it was hard to tell how long she spent in that state. It was possible. But why?

Maybe the people in the house would provide a clue. She took a deep breath of mixed water and air, bubbling in the back of her throat, and winced at the sensation. The water didn't hurt her the way it would have, but it felt unpleasant.

She stumbled towards the house. Crawling, like the other girl did, might have been easier, but Dorita wanted to cling to the things that made her more human. When she had been alive she had never liked dead girls—the way they moved, their black eyes, the wet sound of their breathing in the video clips that appeared on the news. She didn't have a choice about a lot of those things now; but she could walk instead of crawling, for as long as she could. Some dead girls walked upright, although they were more rarely covered on the news, so she hoped it would become easier if she stuck with it long enough.

The house was within a few yards of her, the light spilling from a window almost touching her feet, when the curtain was pulled back. Dorita froze, her mind going blank, and tried to fade into the scenery. But there was too much light—she stayed solid.