Wicked Deeds

God, I hate being dead. It’s inconvenient. It’s smelly. It’s gross! Do you have ANY idea how many showers I’ve taken since my life expired? Yet here I am, still carrying around that ‘newly dead smell’.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. I was in my prime! It wasn’t even a traffic accident or house fire that claimed my life. No. I was sitting in front of the boob tube, eating my usual Friday night lasagna, and suffered an aneurysm. Isn’t that just stupid? I think back on all the ways I could have gone out; this has got to be the lamest. I had no medical history of blood clots or anything! This is going to break my Mom’s heart when she finds out. Not my Dad, though. He went out to buy a carton of cigarettes and the dumb bastard never came back. Guess he got lost.

Mom, Tyler, Anastacia, and I were all we had growing up. Mom’s nursing job was enough to pull us through those first years until Tyler started working and adding to the pot. Now we all have jobs… Oh God, what must my boss think of me? It’s been five days! Samantha is an understanding soul, but she’s not going to hold off on that promotion forever. The last thing I wanted was for Silvia to get the manager position, but there was very little I could do about it, being dead.

The jiggling of my locks jolted me back to reality. Dammit! Was I about to get robbed on top of everything else? It’s bad enough I’m dead!

“Hasn’t anybody found this bitch yet? I thought she said her family was tight!” Wait, what was Silvia doing here? I watched as she and two of our co-workers piled into the room. Gregory and Simon looked ready to lift my face out of my lasagna but SIlvia stopped them.

“Are you crazy? Don’t disturb the crime scene! We need the cops to come here and see the body so they can conclude that it wasn’t murder.”

“That’s why we need to get this pasta off of her! If we wash down the body, they’ll never find the-”

“Fuck this,” Gregory shouted over Simon. “I ain’t cleaning no corpse. No one’s gonna investigate after seeing her like this! They’ll just assume her fat ass had a heart attack and move on.”

“Can you be sure of that, Gregory?” Silvia asked with false calm. My mind was reeling. Murder? I’d been murdered? But why?

“Look, you haven’t gotten that promotion yet. It may look a little suspicious if your main competition for the job turned up dead.”

Oh God. I was killed by my co-workers for a job? And how the hell had they gotten whatever poison they’d used into me?

“What we need to be doing is erasing all traces of our presence from the house. I already got rid of the poison vial from her kitchen. We need to make sure there’s nothing more that can incriminate us.”

The murderous trio spread out, using bleach and their gloved hands to erase all the evidence of their crime. I could only shake my head in disbelief. I’d always known that Silvia was competitive, but I never dreamed she was capable of murder to achieve her ends. 

But she was. This crazy bitch had ended my life rather than work under me at our job. She was in the process of destroying the evidence of her dastardly deed. She was going to get away with it. How many others had she murdered to get her own way? And even if I was the first, SHE’D FUCKING MURDERED ME!

For probably the first time in my entire life, I felt an incandescent fury building inside of me. All my life I’d prided myself on being even-tempered and the soul of calm - two traits that would have served me well in my new supervisor position. Anastacia had complained that I had no true passion in me, that I was just drifting through life. I’d never had a pet or a boyfriend to dote on or anyone to break my heart. I mean, I felt things, but nothing had ever entered my life that disturbed my routine enough to evoke a real response out of me.

Well, I was sure the fuck evoked now. This bitch had ended my life. She’d taken away my whole future and all its glorious possibilities. She’d destroyed my life, deprived me of the chance to fall in love, have kids, raise a family, BE with my family… all over a job? Over a FUCKING job?

The anger in me was suddenly more than I could handle. I was standing in front of my body, lying face down in my last meal, boiling with rage. The enmity, frustration, exasperation, and plain hatred combined in me in a way that I’d never experienced in my life. Suddenly my dead body was moving of its own volition. The feeling of drawing air into my deflated lungs and breathing fire from my indignation was disconcerting, but I’d take it over the feelings of helplessness I’d been feeling for the last five days. My body stood slowly, clumsily. I was shaking, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out whether it was the effort of reanimating my body or the naked fury of the situation.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. There was a wind in the apartment and the lights were flickering as I gathered strength to rejoin with my body. I wanted vengeance! How dare they take my life on a whim? My body rose from the seat shakily, the first time my physical body had moved in almost a week. I’d just been watching myself decompose all this time. 

“What the ever-living fuck,” Simon screamed, dropping my jar of basil with a crash. Gregory didn’t even bother to scream. He just ran for the door, Simon on his heels. 

“Impressive,” Silvia smiled at me as I managed to get my neck to turn. She was smirking at me. The arrogant bitch was actually smirking at me! I made my arms reach out to grasp her neck and pull her close as rotten lasagna layers flaked off my face. “So few people can summon the energy to return to their bodies. They just pass on or sit watching themselves decompose for eons. So sad.” Her ‘Mean Girl’ attitude was starting to get to me. My hands tightened around her neck, but she continued to smirk at me. “What are you going to do, kill me? You don’t have it in you.”

The police burst into my apartment just then, covering their noses at my unrelenting stench and yelling to get our hands in the air. Sylvia smiled at me sweetly before raising her hands over her head without a word.

“Release your captive and put your hands in the air,” one of the officers screamed at me. How could this stuck-up bitch know anything about dead bodies and the behaviors of spirits? Who was she really? “Let go of her and get your hands in the air! We are prepared to shoot!”

I tried to work my mouth to ask them to stop, but my vocal cords weren’t cooperating. And it suddenly occurred to me: it didn’t matter what I had to say. I was a dead woman. Silvia was going to get away with this, she would be free to do this to someone else. I was the only one who could stop her.

The sound of her neck snapping wasn’t nearly as loud as the sound of gunshots ringing through my small apartment. The shock of that first bullet to the head ripped me out of my body, my corpse collapsing to the chair I’d been sitting in when I breathed my last.

It was worth it, though. The look of fear and disbelief on that woman’s face in the split-second before I ended her life was the perfect revenge for ending my life.

I had a flash forward in those few seconds before darkness swallowed me and I left this plain. I saw them raid Silvia’s apartment and find enough evidence to condemn her for not only my murder but the murders of three other people over the last seven years. Simon and Gregory were charged with accessory to my murder and thrown in jail. My family got a nice settlement from Silvia's estate - not to mention the court-appointed legal compensation from Simon and Gregory's court case. They used the money to get themselves out of the city. All of this because of the split-second decision at the very end of my life.

Peace flooded me. The peace of the justified. Smiling as my life left me, I accepted my fate.