Oh How Its Been So Long

Brand new work!  This are the first few paragraphs of the first chapter of the novella I am working on, to be called "Good Thing Gone," or possibly something cooler.  Read, comment, enjoy, hate, whatev.

Death

               

                You never know a good thing until it’s gone.  Life is like that—a good thing; and, until you don’t have it anymore, you tend to take it for granted.  I know I did.  But not anymore.  Because, I died.  I died naked.  Except for a pair of shoes.

                I didn’t know I was dead.  Not at first.  That realization came as I watched my reflection in a shard of glass.  I watched myself bleed, stiffen, and bloat.  Finally, the stench reached the hall; the neighbors complained; the maintenance man unlocked my front door.  The man who found me has been no doubt scarred for life.  I feel for him, it’s terrible finding a dead body, especially when it’s your own.

                I didn’t know what was happening.  The seconds it took for my lungs to stop breathing and my heart to stop beating were black.  The days it took for them to find my body went by like moments in a montage; a second of rigor mortis, a flash of flies lying eggs, a brief instance in which my belly deflated and I succumbed to the effects of decomposition.  I know all of this now; recognize it for what it is, but in that place following my death, I thought for sure it must be a nightmare. 

And then they came for me.  They placed a sheet over my body and transported me to the morgue.  I knew it when I felt the unrelenting cold of the freezer, the hollow emptiness of my body as it sat open on the table. 

Since I had no place else to go, and I still didn’t know how exactly it had happened, I hung around the morgue and learned my cause of death.  A stray bullet, a drive-by shooting, an unintentional mistake by a wanna-be-gangsta.  It ripped through my heart, my lung, my breast.  It shattered the mirror in which I had been looking, deciding on an outfit to go with my new red shoes.  Shoes now in a plastic bag; evidence, to be locked away and never worn again.

It was all very depressing, watching my death unfold, so I sat up and walked away from my body.  The sutures down my front where clumsy and dark, my skin, insipid, a sick contrast to them.  I resembled a fucked up rag doll, gnarled and broken, an imitation of human.  I was glad when they put me in the hearse.  I was thrilled when they burned me.  It took so long to get there, to get to that point, to be disposed of.  I waited for that moment my whole-death-long; for the weight of existence to be lifted.  Turn my shoulders to ash and the world topples away.

The relief never came.  But something else did.

His name was Dexter.