Don't Call Me Dead

12. Home in the Woods

"Here's my place," he says, stepping aside and gesturing at the hill.

I stare at it blankly, my mind still stuck back in the swamp where we left Gia. The man did pick up our bags, fishing them out of the dirt with a stick, but he refused to try to search for Gia's body. My mind boggles when I try to process what has happened. Gia is dead, and I'm stuck in the middle of a swamp in a company of some bizarre man who's let my friend die. He did save me, though, but only because I reminded him of a Marilyn Monroe picture on some DVD cover.

He looks at me expectantly. "You don't like it?"

"Don't like what?"

"My place." He gestures again.

"The hill?"

"No, it's my home." A wide smile appears on his face, and he start walking towards the hill.

The earth is drier in the clearing and it seems I don't need to follow his footsteps anymore. An idea of bolting into the woods crosses my mind, but I banish it immediately. I have seen what the swamps can do. I can't navigate them by myself.

He stops and turns to me, and I realize he's standing by a door.

"Neat, right?" He grins at me excitedly, like a child showing off his tree house. "Father built it all, but I made some furniture. Come in, come in, you'll like it." He opens the door.

I follow him inside. The room is surprisingly spacious, but dark, and smells of a thousand unpleasant things. The very first breath I take makes me gag. The floor is littered by enormous amount of rubbish. In one corner, three crosses stick out of the dirt floor. I stop and stare at them.

"What's this?"

"Oh, this?" He glances at the crosses, then crouches next to the pile of clothes on the floor and begins to dig in it. "It's my family," he says without looking. "Mom, Dad, and sis."

"You buried your family inside your house?"

"Sure." He glances up before continuing his search. "Families should always stick together. Oh, here it is!" He gets up, retrieving a white dress with blue flowers print. "You should put this on." He steps over to me and starts to unbutton my shirt.

"What are you doing?" I swat at his hands. "Stop it!"

He blinks at me. "Why?"

"Because!" The whole situation is so bizarre. On one hand, there's a stranger trying to undress me, which can only be interpreted in one way, but on the other, there's an air about him as if he doesn't quite understand what he's doing, or perhaps understands it in some completely different way. "You can't touch me!"

"Why not?"

"Because..." I pause. "Because I don't want you to."

"But we'll have to touch," he says seriously. "To make babies, we'll have to touch."

I just gape at him.

"I'm not having babies with you," I say at last.

"You don't have to have them right now," he says placatingly. "But families must have babies."

"I'm not your family."

He smiles and cups my face with his hand. "Sure you are. I've married you."

Lost for words, I just stare into his blue, well-meaning, crazy eyes. At least he doesn't seem to be in an amorous mood right now. I should just take this one step at a time.

"I don't want to wear this," I say. "It's not my dress."

"Yeah, but you can have it." He lets go of my face and examines the dress in his hand. "I like it. Ever since I've found it, I wanted to see it on someone." He looks at me. "Someone like you."

"You've found it?"

"Yeah, in one of the backpacks." He gestures around his junkyard of a floor. "The owner is dead, so she won't need it anymore."

"Dead?"

"Drowned." He shrugs. "People come to swamps sometimes, and some of them just... drown."

"They drown by themselves, or do you... well... help them?"

"Sometimes I help them, yes," he says with an eager grin, as if asked a question he was dying to answer. "Sometimes when they come too close to my place, I need to help them drown. Father said it had to be done, because they're all spies. If they tell on us, the whole capitalist machine will come to crush our natural existence. And the cops will lock us for life because people can't be free and live in the woods."

I blink at him. This is too much to process.

"So, I'm a spy, too?" I say after a pause.

He nods. "Yes. But now that we're married, you are family, so you don't need to drown."

Married. Family. Insane.

"And what's happened to the rest of your family?" I point at the crosses in the corner.

"Oh." He scratches his chin. "They went to a better place."

"Did you...help them go to a better place?"

"Only to my father," he says. "Because he started it right, but he ended it wrong. But I can do it right." He smiles at me. "You and I, we can do it right."

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