Life According to the Dead

Amanda

Amanda Easter was in a grocery store, and she did not remember how she'd gotten there.

She had been to the store several times during her life and she knew every aisle by heart, but no matter how familiar, it was only a store. There was no reason for her to be there now – in fact, she couldn't even remember deciding to come. She didn't need groceries. She would much rather have gone to see Stanley – and hadn't she been going there in the first place, anyway?

She shook her head. It hurt, for some reason, to think about Stanley.

She didn't know why, of course, but she couldn't shake the unprovoked feeling that when it came to trailing around through a random place for absolutely no reason, anything would have been better. Anything but this, anything but watching a bunch of ignorant twits ambling around in search of Cheerios and detergent. But all the same, something seemed to be propelling her into the store, something so strong and firm, something so completely inarguable that she would have felt foolish to resist it.

She had the faintest sense that she was looking for someone.

Someone with dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes, dark everything, with a pale face and sick green eyes that seem to stab you when he turns in your direction–

No. Not him. But for some reason the face, the unfamiliar face, was throbbing inside her head anyway.

She wandered around, her deliberate gaze combing section after section. To her it felt aimless, but she walked purposefully, as if her feet knew her destination better than her mind. The roses in the floral area shriveled and wilted as she drifted past. A few times she almost stopped automatically to greet an old friend or neighbor – but the shoppers looked through her as one might look through a haze, and her feet kept driving her onward.

She couldn't remember much. She tried, as she walked, to piece it all together in her head. The only problem was gathering the pieces in the first place. There was the parking lot – that much was still clear. She remembered the moonlight glinting off the asphalt, and something else. Something wet and red and sticky drying in thin smears on the pavement.

She felt sick. She kept walking.

And that face – She tried to remember the face again, to think of it more distinctly and to pin it with a name, but it had already slipped away.

She thought back to something else, to the first time she'd ever shopped here, several years before. Her family had just moved to Meadford – she couldn't have been more than six or seven at the time. She had never lived in a city before, and the only grocery store she had ever visited back in her hometown had been a small local place, barely half the size of this. She was used to snacking on the store's bananas and letting her mother pay for them at the end of the trip, so that day she had made a beeline for the produce section. While eating her banana, she'd absently wandered away from her mother and quickly lost herself in the huge store, labyrinthine to one so young. She'd ended up going missing for nearly twenty minutes before an old lady had finally showed her to the front of the store. Her mother had scolded her all the way home.

She pretended she was lost now – because she was, in a way, even though by now she knew the store as well as her own house. She didn't know where she was going, and she couldn't really remember why she was there. She had only the memory of a man's face – no, not even a memory, a blurred echo of a memory – and that one image that she couldn't shake from her thoughts, the flash of the empty parking lot, dimly lit in the night. Yes, it had been night.

The only thing she knew besides that was that she was looking for someone who could help her.

She found him in the cereal aisle.