Author Games: Empty Night

Quarterfinals: Avacado Marissa

The undead are scared: More than anything else, their lives rest within the ever-changing threads of immortality and blissful death. Avacado Marissa awoke years ago and has walked the Earth around twice in her mind. Her feet ache and her head is tired. There is a ghost of a past that whispers at her but she will never remember it--that is true of all things, as memory only lasts so long, and she'd been raised far after her death.

Far. It was queer--a word that could mean far far away and a word that could also mean two hours, thirty-two minutes, and fifty-three seconds. A word that could mean centuries ago and a word that could mean two miles. She'd been running, moving, forcing, herself away from them.

One door would close and another would open. The undead were resourceful, of course. Finding ways to get away. Finding ways to run.

Perhaps when Ava was first raised, life was meaningful. Of course it was. That Ava would find joy in the chase. She would giggle to herself. Because a giggle still existed in that throat. A giggle still had meaning.

Meaning stopped existing long ago. Her heart would like to say that it stopped with Foster, but that would be a lie too grievous to mutter. Meaning had stopped the day that she found out the truth: The undead could never truly live again. They were mind-slaves set to live and work for others. After that, they weren't supposed to have a use. She'd managed to find one for years--a use here, a use there. She'd do it well too.

Her latest use? The job that forced her to run and so she kept going, kept running because she had to figure out the truth. She had to know. She could fall down on her knees and let them catch her, let them kill her, spill whatever truth they may from her lips, pry her body apart and watch it fall, but that would mean she'd never know.

Ava had awoken to dirt in her fingers and she felt it then, pressing against her. It wanted free. She wanted to dig and dig and keep digging until the world ended--she forced herself to keep going. She was in some sort of construction. Some sort of work. People passed and they saw her and she knew they saw her more than she saw them because Ava was slow and people were fast and she could never catch up to them because they were alive and she was dead. Her scattered heart would beat too fast and she'd feel something, something, but no, she just kept moving, until it wasn't imaginary dirt under her fingers, it was real dirt, below her feet, against her back, skidding as she slid, slid, slid, forcing herself to keep sliding, letting her back fall easily against it, her head looking up at the sky as her feet hit with force and the world stopped moving and it was just a dark sky with angry white clouds. She wanted it to rain. Rain felt fitting.

It wouldn't rain. So she stayed there, in a hole, construction before her, knowing that if she got back up something might fall off. It had been a few days, hadn't it? Her thoughts were getting too scattered, too slow, weren't they? Because she was dying. Before, that would scare her more than anything else. Because the thing she wanted most was the thing that made her imaginary heart tighten up.

Now, there's a coldness there. Ava was still scared, of course, they were, but they'd never be able to stop death and at one point, death had to be accepted. What made it come when they were on the run from the Seelie court and trying to escape certain death they couldn't say, but the sky said it was true. The sky said it was time.

Time. The thing that not quite was but was almost: The thing that was there and hidden: The thing that was scared: The thing that hid between the embers of reality and the fragile truths of humanity: The thing that existed only for the living. She knew it was only for the living, that it would never be for the dead because the deader she got the worse time became. She moved at a perfectly rational speed but the truth stood that she was dial-up and the world had switched to Verizon Mobile.

She had a job. That was the one thing that still mattered. It mattered because they couldn't die without seeing the ending. Who killed the Dragon Prince? Who caused all the deaths after? Who would have done such a crime? And then, the one question that she was okay not knowing: Why.

Curiosity killed the cat and god, she wished it would kill the Ava too.

A younger Ava would have taken the dirt under her fingers to mean that there was still something in life. She would have been reminded of when she was raised, the dirt there, the force, the magic that broke her and remade her, of the time when magic still had a beauty to it, of the time it was raw, was dangerous, was going to take away the only peace she'd ever had, of when it stripped her of all knowledge, took everything away from her, left her in a blank room with a man and a contract saying she'd work for him for so many years and then she could be free. She would have remembered the vigor she'd worked with then. How she fought so hard.

How she named herself because the world was cold and nameless but she could remember that damn blackened fruit they kept in baskets. The fruit she'd harvest for the next several years. There would be more, of course, as all labor existed to be shared within them, but that fruit was her. A lifeline. A truth. When she was younger, truth still had meaning.

The name Marissa came later when she'd watched a movie, and the name felt right. Ava was someone who could be nothing and everything. Marissa was a girl, scared as she might be, and Marissa was just looking for something to keep her alive. For a while, a long damn while, Marissa had wandered through the city with glints of tears in her eyes at how alive everything was. She fell in love with many people because she still believed that love might exist. That she had feelings.

That it wasn't magic animating her. That her heart needed to beat, not that it did it to make her happy.

Ava knew better. Ava knew that life was bitter and terrible and that avocados were only really good within a few days of harvest and that she was only good for that bit of time that she could pretend that she was something she wasn't. That she might find a way to turn herself human again. That she might force her body to live.

Ava couldn't see the death that looms over her. But she could touch her fingers, see the dirt surrounding them, ground into the nails, and pick them up because two of them had fallen off. And she could know that it would be the last time she held them. There wouldn't be another dose of dark magic to reanimate those fingers. There wouldn't be another anything.

She'd live. Just to solve a case.

Then, she'd find Foster, and punch him for going first.