7220 Seconds

I was twenty five when my wife gave birth to my daughter, forty when my daughter died. When she came back to life, we took her home. She died crossing the road, run over by someone texting on their phone, jolted from the conversation by my daughter crashing into her windscreen. Going forty five in a thirty, fast enough to kill. It was on a mundane day, going to school, following the ebb and flow of the river of life. 

 

But the river brought the dead back. Some called it the end days, or judgement day, when the dead shall rise. Revelation eleven eighteen, but I’m not a Christian, not anything. I called it a perversion of nature, a mutation of life. The recent dead rose from the grave silently, pulling themselves from the dirt, fighting to the surface, reborn for the second time. In the early days, the military put them down, a hail of bullets sending them back to the dirt, never to rise again. We had to fight for normality, to refuse this new process of death because our fragile minds struggled to cope with it. Imagine grieving for your loved one, then having them return as an animated shell. Could you turn them away? 

 

It kept happening, the dead rising soon after death. It became a natural process of life, the dead quickly integrating with the living. Imagine, your dead loved one rising, braindead, eyes blankly staring, animated by some dormant personality of the person they once were. 

 

My daughter came back two hours and twenty seconds after death. That was the exact time of rebirth for everyone who died. You didn’t even bury people, just laid them out and waited. On their rise, you took them home and tried to act as though they were still the person they were. But they weren’t, of course, just an animated cadaver with no personality of the person they once were. We had a birthday for Emily, made a cake, sat her in a chair in front of it and sang happy birthday. Her head rolled to the side, her mouth opening and closing, teeth clicking together. Drooling, groaning and moaning. 

 

Two hours and twenty seconds. Tick-tock, the clock goes, waiting for the body to shake, to convulse, to rise. 

 

One, two, three… You count the seconds and wait.

 

Seven thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds. 

 

Emily was a happy girl before she died, the one who laughed more than she cried. There was always this wide eyed wonder she had, a thirst for life. The girl sitting before me doesn’t smile, has a gapping mouth which occasionally drools. Her eyes are still wide, but here’s no spark of life behind the milky stare. Her skin, once flushed with life, is tinged blue, and her movements are stiff as she fights rigour mortis. She’ll die again as her body decays over the coming months until she finally falls apart, but we can’t abandon her. My wife thinks she still exists somewhere inside, that deep down she knows her family still love her, and that’s enough. Does she feel her body rotting from within, dying slowly again, but experiencing every terrible moment in a living death? 

 

You can’t kill her, can’t lock her out in the cold. It would be cruel, so we wait, counting the seconds. 

 

One, two, three….

 

Some people turn their backs on their dead loved ones, but the dead instinctively know where to go, how to find their old homes. Some dead stand and stare through the windows at the family who abandoned them. I’ve seen people drawing their curtains on them, shutting them out. We couldn’t do that, not to our Emily. 

 

She’s family, but I can’t help but see her as something rotten, her stench of decay filling the house, turning my stomach. There are scented wax burners all over the house, the windows open wide, even in winter. The house is always cold, the wind blowing through, shifting the decay mixed with sweetness of the sweet scented air. Sometimes she moans, an escape of gasses giving the dead a voice. 

 

Urrrghhhhhh…. Urrrrrrghhhhhhh. 

 

Is she trying to say something? Perhaps she’s asking for mercy, for the torment of this death to become final? 

 

It’s been a month since she came back, and her face has sunken, cheeks hollow, skin rotting. She’s barely recognisable as human. Her eyes bulge, skin pulled tight over her skull. Lips are almost gone, pulled back over teeth that occasionally click together. At night you can hear the clicking of teeth as whatever animates Emily tries to move her. Two thirty in the morning, three thirty, five… Click, click, click. 

 

Urggggghhhhh. 

 

Keeping me awake, the smell of decay heavy in the stillness of the night. We talked about moving her to the shed, as the smell becomes unbearable the more rotten she gets. But you can’t do that to a loved one, can you? Sometimes I’ve woken, finding her standing by the side of the bed, staring down at me. Drooling. Groaning. 

 

Teeth clicking. 

 

I feel guilty for wanting her to hurry up and die again. 

 

Seven thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds to return to life. No one knows why it’s that long. Everything in the universe is maths, I once read. It’s a rule of nature, a precise number of nature like Pi… three point one four…

 

Eight hundred and seventy hours to rot enough to cease to exist again. That’s too long to count in seconds. Sometimes they last nine hundred hours. Some families refuse to bury them again, keeping them a fixture in the living room, a talking point for visitors. Nice corpse you have there, how do you cope with the smell? 

“We have scented wax. Lavender is good for the first month, but then you need to switch it up to something stronger.”

 

People like sharing tips.

 

Nature has become perverted. We embrace perversion, because how can we not? These are people we loved… love. 

 

Emily came back after Seven thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds. I counted each second, including the Mississippi between the spaces. 

 

When Emily died, I struggled to come to terms with it. I don’t think I can wait another four thousand, three hundred and eighty hours for her second death. That’s why I’ve taken an overdose, why I’m counting the seconds until I die. 

 

So far it’s been three thousand seconds, but I’m struggling to keep count as my eyes grow heavy. Emily stares at me in her chair opposite, but there’s no emotion. Perhaps I’d hoped there’d be some spark, knowing her dad is going to endure the same fate as her. Death will come for me soon, and then I’ll be back seven thousand, two hundred and twenty seconds later. 

 

I’ve already chosen the scented wax melts to hide the smell of decay, because I know my wife will keep me here, waiting eight hundred and seventy hours for me to go through the final death. 

 

How many seconds is that? I wonder, as my eyes close on life. I think it’s better to think of it in months, because it doesn’t seem as long, does it? 

 

Death comes. 

 

Count one hundred and forty seconds. 

 

One.

 

Two. 

 

Three…..