The Living Dead

there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago.'

I reached out a hand, and touched her. Her body was hard, and slim, and lithe, and her breasts felt like breasts that Gauguin might have painted. Her mouth, in the darkness, was soft and warm against mine.

People come into your life for a reason.

4

'Those people ought to know who we are and tell that we are here'

When I woke, it was still almost dark, and the room was silent. I turned on the light, looked on the pillow for a ribbon, white or red, or for a mouse-skull earring, but there was nothing to show that there had ever been anyone in the bed that night but me.

I got out of bed and pulled open the drapes, looked out of the window. The sky was graying in the east.

I thought about moving south, about continuing to run, continuing to pretend I was alive. But it was, I knew now, much too late for that. There are doors, after all, between the living and the dead, and they swing in both directions.

I had come as far as I could.

There was a faint tap-tapping on the hotel-room door. I pulled on my pants and the T-shirt I had set out in, and barefoot, I pulled the door open.

The coffee girl was waiting for me.

Everything beyond the door was touched with light, an open, wonderful predawn light, and I heard the sound of birds calling on the morning air. The street was on a hill, and the houses facing me were little more than shanties. There was mist in the air, low to the ground, curling like something from an old black-and-white film, but it would be gone by noon.

The girl was thin and small; she did not appear to be more than six years old. Her eyes were cobwebbed with what might have been cataracts; her skin was as gray as it had once been brown. She was holding a white hotel cup out to me, holding it carefully, with one small hand on the handle, one hand beneath the saucer. It was half filled with a steaming mud-colored liquid.

I bent to take it from her, and I sipped it. It was a very bitter drink, and it was hot, and it woke me the rest of the way.

I said, 'Thank you.'

Someone, somewhere, was calling my name. The girl waited, patiently, while I finished the coffee. I put the cup down on the carpet; then I put out my hand and touched her shoulder. She reached up her hand, spread her small gray fingers, and took hold of mine. She knew I was with her. Wherever we were headed now, we were going there together.

I remembered something somebody had once said to me. 'It's okay. Every day is freshly ground,' I told her.

The coffee girl's expression did not change, but she nodded, as if she had heard me, and gave my arm an impatient tug. She held my hand tight with her cold, cold fingers, and we walked, finally, side by side into the misty dawn.

She's Taking Her Tits To The Grave

by Catherine Cheek

Catherine Cheek has sold fiction to magazines such as Ideomancer, Susurrus, and Cat Tales. She also has stories forthcoming in anthologies such as The Leonardo Variations—an anthology to benefit the Clarion Writers' Workshop, of which Cheek is a graduate—and Last Drink Bird Head, a charity anthology whose proceeds will go toward promoting literacy. When not writing, Cheek plays with molten glass and takes care of her two children (and nine pets).

The idea for this story came from the theme of the 2007 World Fantasy Convention which was 'ghosts and revenants.'  Cheek didn't know what a revenant was, so she looked it up and discovered it was a person who came back from the dead and caused great trouble for the living.  'It's that last part that intrigued me,' she says. 'What kind of trouble could they cause?'

Cheek could relate to the character in the story—a trophy wife who returns from the dead to find her body is not what it used to be. 'My body is getting older every day, and I suspect that it will one day actually stop working,' she says. 'Life is a fatal epidemic.'

Melanie hitchhiked for the first time ever after she climbed out of her grave. A week later, and she wouldn't have been able to flirt her way into the trunk of a late model sedan, much less shotgun with full access to the radio. But she had had a stellar figure, a southern California tan, and bleach-blonde hair that could pass for natural. Maintaining a beautiful body had landed her a rich husband, and she'd kept the position of wife long past the time when a less successful trophy would have been replaced.

That nice face and body still served her, for the embalmers had done a great job preserving her not- inconsequential looks. The middle-aged chiropractor who drove her from the cemetery would happily have driven her all the way across town to the house she shared with Brandon, her husband, but she decided to go to Larry's condo first.

More than anything else, she needed to find the man who had raised her from the dead.

A few people noticed as she walked from the parking lot to Larry's door, and she got some second looks, but she paid them no mind. People often mistook her for an actress or a model here in Los Angeles, the land of the Barbie.

The steps up to Larry's condo seemed endless when you were wearing four-inch heels. She smoothed her hair, cleared her throat before knocking on Larry's door, and felt a thrill of anticipation. Wasn't he going to be happy to see she was alive again!

But Larry's mouth gaped, closed partially, then reopened. His eyes bugged out, like a fish flopping on a shore gasping for air.

'What are you doing here?' Larry finally said. 'I thought you were dead.'

'I am.' She pushed her way into the condo, irritated. For that, she didn't slip her pumps off and line them up next to his five pairs of shoes on the tile, but tracked grave dirt across his white carpet. 'And I don't appreciate you raising me from the grave if this is the kind of welcome I'm going to get.'

Larry had slipped on his loafers to walk two feet from the carpet to the door, and now he took them off. His linen pants were cuffed, but not wrinkled, and he smoothed the fabric out as he settled at the far edge of the couch. 'Why are you here?'

'Because you raised me.' Melanie looked at her fingers. The grave had not yet been filled in with dirt, a small blessing, but her manicure looked terrible. 'Why are you being such a prick? Come on, it's me, baby.'

'Did someone murder you?' Larry asked. He perched on the edge of the cushion, hands resting on knees, leaning away from her. 'Is that why you're haunting the living?'

'No one killed me, Larry, I just went in for a routine tummy tuck. Must have been some kind of complication.'

'So if no one murdered you, why are you haunting me?'

Melanie frowned. She'd been excited to see him, flattered that he loved her enough to raise her from the dead, but now it was apparent that he didn't. All those times he swore he couldn't get enough of her, and now he was tapping nicotine-stained fingers (and she had always hated how his condo stank like cigarettes), his gaze flicking towards the door. Why had she ever slept with this man?