Beneath The Waves

(3) The Undead Corpse

Chapter 3

Ryan watched as his mother, Nicky, flitted around the kitchen like a frantic hummingbird, scratching around for this and digging about for that. She was always busy ordering or making things; these days, she barely ever sat down. He watched her antics as he slowly shovelled cereal into his mouth.

“How was band practice yesterday?” Nicky asked distractedly.

“Good,” Ryan replied automatically.

“And what about your football?”

“Good.”

“Good, good...” Nicky scrunched her light brown hair up into a short pony tail and rubbed the back of her neck anxiously.

“What a wide range of vocabulary our family has,” Cora mused, gliding into the kitchen like a swan. “I’m so proud.”

Ryan glanced at his older sister with his eyebrows raised. Cora was twenty two, and finishing her final year of English Literature at Edinburgh University, though he often thought she looked more like she went to a hippie convention. Ever since she’d started university, her style of clothes had changed from casual to downright weird. She wore mismatched, brightly coloured everything, let her long golden brown hair tumble to her waist (and often threaded flowers through it) and spent most of her time critiquing her family’s English skills whenever she returned home from Uni.

“You stole all our vocabulary when you left,” he told her.

“Morning, sweetheart.” Nicky glanced at her daughter. “How’re you?”

“Splendiferous,” Cora chimed.

“Stop showing off,” Ryan told her.

“You’re just jealous, little bro,” Cora sighed, sitting down, “of my momentous talent.”  

Nicky watched her children with a sad smile. Ever since Noah’s disappearance, Ryan had noticed hard lines around her mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there before, and a haunted look in her eyes, born of the sleepless nights she’d spent worrying and crying. It was as if losing her son had made her old before her time.

Noah had always been the life of the family. Even though he was awkward around other people and preferred his own company, he loved his family, and his laughter could light up a whole room with its childlike happiness.

Noah’s ‘differences’ had meant that he was a lot smarter than other people, but not smart enough to work out how to interact with them. He stood too close to people when he talked, which unnerved them, could talk for hours about the things he liked at a rapid pace, often using difficult words they couldn’t understand, and he could never read facial expressions well. He’d been bullied a lot when he was younger, which was probably what had made Ryan so protective of him, as if he was the older brother. Despite their obvious differences, Ryan and Noah had been best friends. They looked out for each other, understood each other, better than anyone else.

Ryan gripped the handle of his spoon tightly, his appetite gone. He tried to focus on the rain splattering against the window instead of thinking about the brother he’d probably never see again.

Definitely never see again, he told himself firmly. Stop thinking like that.

His mother read the pain in his expression and guessed what he was thinking about. She squeezed his shoulder as she walked past.

“What’re you up to day?” she asked, with forced enthusiasm.

Ryan shrugged. “Dunno. Might go for a walk.”