She went back to staring into space.
When she stood up to leave for the park, the pin was still protruding from her arm.
I reached up and pulled it out; she didn’t notice.
The dead don’t seem to age, either. Eating only a few bites of bread a day—plus one piece of chocolate cake a month—they’ve all lost a bit of weight, but otherwise they haven’t changed.
I’d kind of expected their hair to keep growing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Which is probably just as well because the dead’s hair is invariably a mess. Someone living always has to comb it for them because for some reason they will not do it themselves.
The one exception to this is Rosemary Harold, who died without a single hair on her body—not even an eyelash—because she’d been in the middle of chemotherapy.
Alice is one of the few dead people in the park who hasn’t been reduced to wearing hand-me-downs thanks to her mother, who still buys her new clothes when she needs them.
The first couple of years, she used to take her to the mall, which wasn’t easy since the sales people didn’t like serving the dead and wouldn’t let her try anything on, and there was one guard who’d obviously seen Dawn of the Dead on television and would always follow them around, scowling, from the minute they arrived. But Alice’s mother persevered because she said it was the one time Alice actually seemed to know where she was and why she was there. She even claimed Alice would invariably head straight for the most expensive thing in the shop, just like she did when she was alive.
Not that it matters now the mall is shut.
At one time this town had five churches, four cafes, six bars, two auto dealerships, three banks, two primary schools, a high school, a motel, a funeral parlour, and a meat-packing plant (which closed the day after a calf’s head on a shelf in the freezer room was seen blinking). All of them are boarded up now. So are most of the houses.
The streets are full of abandoned dogs and cats. It’s the live ones you’ve got to watch out for, because they’re nervous.
My next door neighbour adopted a dead dog. When I asked her why, she said, “Why not? He’s no trouble and he doesn’t bark.”
Five years ago, they said it was a miracle I was still alive. Three weeks ago they told me the miracle was coming to an end; my organs were shutting down one by one. All because of one stupid thing I did one night when I was sixteen.
People told me my only hope was to get out of this town before I died. They told me it only happens here; if I die somewhere else, I won’t wake up. I won’t end up with those zombies in the park.
I’m sure all those people were right, but I knew something they didn’t know.
I’ve been going to the same doctor since I was a kid—he’s the only doctor in town these days—and the last time I saw him, he said he was going to tell me a secret.
Remember I told you about when it all first started, and how they shipped a man’s body to another state to see if he would wake up, and he did?
It turns out my doctor was sent along to accompany the body. He was there when the man woke up, and he’d asked him: “What was it like being dead? Do you remember any of it?”
And to his amazement, the man had answered him.
“He spoke?” I said.
My doctor nodded. “Only that one time, and never again. Considering what he said, I thought it was best to keep quiet about it.”
“Why? What did he say?”
“All you need to know is: there are a lot worse places a person could end up,” my doctor said as I left his office that last time, “than in the park.”
I went to the park today and saw a dead man sitting on a bench with Hilary Frentzen combing his hair.
What is it about the dead that they refuse to comb their own hair? For five years I had been telling myself that I would be the exception. I would be the one who speaks, who dresses herself, who eats vegetables, who continues to do simple things like comb her own hair… but with every moment that passed, these things seemed less and less important.
The next thing I knew, I was standing face to face with Alice. And for the first time in five years, she looked at me as if she knew me.
Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco
By Seth Lindberg
Seth Lindberg’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Phantom, Denying Death, The Darker Side, Brainbox, Brainbox II, Haunting the Dead, Jack Haringa Must Die!, Jigsaw Nation, and in the magazines Not One of Us, Twilight Showcase, Gothic.net, and Chiaroscuro. He is also a former editor of Gothic.net and currently works as a sysadmin in San Francisco, where, as the title implies, this story takes place.