A Zest For Life

The clerk hummed a quiet discordant tune as she worked. Ariel sat across from the clerk, silent and waiting with a quiver of apprehension tingling through her body.

"Unfortunately, we haven't got a single soul to match you with," the clerk said, closing the file. The clerk sat at her desk, staring at Ariel through her thick, bug-eyed glasses and expecting the young woman to get up and leave.

The clerk wore a fuzzy, striped sweater and had a long slender body. The nameplate at the front of her desk read, Katy Pillar. Her severe, narrow face seemed almost alien, accentuated when she sucked her teeth. Katy Pillar pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and clicked her long red fingernails impatiently on her wooden desk with an even common time rhythm.

Ariel sat in the uncomfortable chair while Katy Pillar's cramped office closed in on her becoming as claustrophobic as the casket they buried her in. A buzzing sound like a hundred thousand insect wings droned inside Ariel's head as her leafy green eyes glazed over. Her blank, expressionless face was the kind of face people liked to look at, with symmetrical and feminine features, soft but not too soft, sharp but not too sharp; it looked best when a hint of a smile pulled up the corners of her mouth. But she couldn't manage an expression at that moment; some things come as such a surprise, they make it impossible to emote.

As the office closed in on her, the rest of the world retracted to a distant hazy dreamscape, which penetrated Ariel's thoughts with vague suggestions of its existence like a dull subconscious murmur in the back of her mind.

"I don't understand," Ariel said," Your slogan is 'There's someone for everyone.'"

Over Katy Pillar's shoulder, Ariel could see the company logo on the wall, LuvBug™ in cutesy letters on the red and black back of a ladybug.

"Normally, that's true. But honestly, you're just not a very attractive prospect. Are you?" Katy Pillar asked, clicking her pen. "Your lividity alone is a problem," she continued.

"What's the problem?" Ariel asked. Since dying, she had had nothing but trouble.

"Well, dear, you're just not dead enough. Are you?"

When your car hits a sheet of black ice, spins out of control, soars down a steep, rocky hill into a twenty-foot high wall of rock, breaking your neck and several other important bones because the airbags failed, people rarely believe you're not dead enough. But that's because they've never been dead before. When you're alive looking like death is never a good sign, but when you're dead, it's imperative.

"But I am dead. I died. I remember it. Vividly," Ariel said.

"Yes. Well, one would," said Katy Pillar, "The truth, dear? It's that healthy glow of yours. I can't figure how you've got it."

"Mostly, yoga," said Ariel, tucking a tress of her short golden blonde hair behind her ear.

"Well, you're not doing yourself any favours. Are you? I'm afraid there isn't much I can do," Katy Pillar shuffled her papers into a pile, picked them up, and knocked them against the desk to straighten them. She clicked her computer mouse, racing it across her desk, and then typed something quickly on her keyboard as her computer screen glowed in her face.

"Please, there has to be something," Ariel leaned forward in her chair and stared into Katy Pillar's large black eyes.

Katy Pillar sighed, "All right, dear. I'm sending you to a specialist on the eleventieth floor. He's handled numerous lost causes like yours. Take the elevator at the end of the hall, to your right, dear. I'll ring him and tell him to expect you," Katy Pillar handed Ariel her file folder.