Hello friends. It’s been an eternity, I know. I’m ready to throw you a bunch of excuses as to why I haven’t been writing. But I’ll spare you. If you wanna write, you’ll make time. Right? I just haven’t made the time lately.
Even now, I’m gonna share an unpublished (sorta) short story. I submitted it to a Facebook group a couple years ago, for a small Halloween competition during the pandemic. I didn’t win anything, but that’s cool. Maybe I’ll win your hearts back today, with a new (sorta) entry? I’ve made a few simple edits.
Anyway, I hope to be back soon with new thoughts and not just reruns. I’ve missed you all. Enjoy.
- Dan
—
An old man sat and watched the sun go down.
Behind the trees, spiky branches, jagged leaves.
Behind the distant mountains, lofty and impregnable.
Yellow and orange, like a burning magma pie shimmering on the horizon.
He watched and thought of his wife in the garden.
Married four decades. Three grown children. Five grandkids.
A good life, people would assure him.
But cancer? An evil way to die.
His hand gripped his chair, hair prickling. Flying ants fluttered in the last wisps of sunlight.
Then, darkness.
No crickets. No dogs barking in the distance. No lizards tut-tutting on the ceiling. Just a dense silence, like an unheard scream.
Earlier in the day an albularyo had sown her incantations in the garden, over the unmarked resting place of his beloved. Under the midday sun they stood, offering ancient words in the terrifying noontime heat, a fever dream of hope and trepidation.
He confessed he missed her more than life.
The witch doctor said, good. And to wait until sunset.
The old man dared not move. The sun was on the other side of the world now. The only light was from his veranda, a gas lantern’s weak ochre diffusion.
A bottle of cheap whiskey sat on a bench. A shovel was ready in the corner.
The trees were motionless.
He watched and waited.
A rustle. And then the wind. The old man turned his head slowly and glanced at a bamboo thicket, cracking in the gentle breeze. All shadows and crafty movement.
The veranda light flickered. The old man leaned forward.
There, in his garden, between the kangkong patch and lemongrass, the soil burst open.
A hand emerged. Gnarled and bony.
The old man squinted.
Underneath the creaking bamboo, shrouded in the dim glow of the lantern light, a mangled corpse surfaced from the earth. Struggling against the compacted dirt, pushing up soil in dark messy piles. Arms, shoulders, torso. Writhing, specked with mud. Dry sounds of uprooting vegetation, plant tendrils and decaying flesh, twined and pulling.
Then silence.
She stood at the foot of the veranda.
The old man removed his hand from his mouth.
“Lila?”
Lila lifted her hand, her skin taut and molding. She pulled hair from her face, revealing an empty eye socket from which she stared back at her husband.
“Lazaro.”
It was her voice, old and guttural.
Lila tilted her head, her rotting teeth glistening like rocks in a putrid canal.
Her tattered clothes fluttered in the breeze. Her favorite dress, now nothing more than rags.
And there they remained, saying nothing but feeling everything.
Until the first shards of light. Until dawn when the spell broke, and Lila crawled back into the earth.
As light crept across the garden, the old man patted down the ground where Lila lay, flicking away pebbles, smoothening the soil, as instructed.
He began to weep.
The abularyo had warned him. He chose to ignore her.
All for one last bittersweet moment.
The old man returned to his chair, unscrewed the bottle, and closed his eyes in the early morning sun.
I will dream about this tonight, I can already feel it.
It’s ironic that the husband’s name is Lazaro, but it’s his wife who “rose from the dead.”