Dead Girls Don't Care

Content Warning: Loss of a child

I've been dead for fifty hours and thirty-four minutes, and when they find my body. Only an hour ago they officially reported me missing.

The pair that find me freeze, horrified by the mangled destroyed condition of my body. I can hear them whispering through my...

I guess the only word for it is dead. My dead state.

"We have to call the police. Oh my God. Is she dead? Please don't tell me she's dead. She looks so young."

The woman in the pair is sobbing hysterically, she's already vomited once. Now she's pulling out a phone and blubbering to what I can only guess is a 911 operator on the other end.

"She looks like she's been crushed. All her bones the wrong way..." A sob. "All bloody, and so young. The man is trying to find some pulse, some sign of life. He's fifty hours and thirty-nine minutes too late.

"Don’t be dead." He begs me, then he turns to the other woman. They must be partners.

"Mallie, her name. It's Aven Trent. She has a necklace on. Says she's epileptic. You don't think she..."

His eyes drift up to the trail above, the harder one. The one that hovers sixty feet over the bloodstained muddy trail where my body lies limp.

"What? Don't think she what?"

"What if she had a seizure and fell?" 

“Oh. Oh, Jon.”

The woman, Mallie, sways, as she sits on the ground. Tears still streaming down her face. Jon crawls over to her, the front of his clothes clutching flakes of dried blood.

“It’s okay Mallie. Did you call for help?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’ll be alright. It’ll be okay soon.” He holds her, she clings to him.

“Is she going to be fine? You’re a nurse, you can help her can’t you?”

I laugh, even though they can’t hear me. He and I both know there isn’t anything he can do for me right now. He tells her as much, as gently as he can of course. Not long after a helicopter whirls in the wind, paramedics lowering themselves like fallen stars. They tenderly take my bloodied broken body into a sling. Then slowly, they drag me up and into the helicopter.

I’m pronounced dead on arrival. I'm the only one not shocked.

After that the police are involved, they start reconstructing the night. Their final conclusion is that I tripped over a rock masked by the night’s darkness. I stumbled over the edge, falling down and down. My parents claimed that they had watched me take my medication, so it wasn’t likely a seizure.

They’re all wrong of course, but it doesn’t matter much. A dead girl doesn’t care what the living think.

My memory consists of escaping the stuffy, suffocating house. Lowering myself out the window, away from the yelling and the anger. Then running, the kind of running that begs the wind to run its hands through your hair. The kind of wind that curls around you and blows your pain away. The kind of wind that fills you with life so irresistible that you have no choice but to keep running. It keeps your lungs filled and your adrenaline in an endless supply. 

So I ran. I ran all the way to that trail. 

And I never thought to remember that I hadn’t taken my medication. In a moment of childish rage, I’d spit the medication back out when neither of my parents were looking.

A seizure meant attention. It meant a break from school. It meant people stopped fighting long enough to make sure I was alive. I was halfway through the trail, and I did slip on a rock at first, but I didn’t fall because of it.

I landed, splayed on the trail, half of my body hanging over the edge. Hands shaking on the phone, trying to call someone. Then the dizziness takes over. Just for a moment, I’m conscious. Then I’m not. My body jerking with a seizure, moving too wildly, and then…

F

    A

      L

       L

         I

          N

           G

Bouncing like a ragdoll off the rocky side of the trail. Falling down and down until I land with one final thump. Resting for just over two days with unfocused eyes and blood-soaked clothes.

The sun crept up, burning into my skin and drying the blood until it cracked and flaked. 

But like I said, a dead girl doesn’t care what the living think.

The memories are the past. The present is more peaceful. My body dressed up and wiped clean of blood, limbs stuck into roughly the right angle, they had to fit me in the casket. It was closed, of course, nobody could bear to see a broken baby.

Now I watch my mother pressed up against my father, sobbing into a handkerchief. My little sister crying too, asking what happened to me.

“She left Clayton. She left because we were fighting.” A fresh sob.

“It’s not your fault.” He whispers back. “She was such a good girl. Strong and brave. And smart, so smart. Kind as well.”

They go on, talking about me. Not knowing I can hear them. They stop crying audibly long enough for a pastor to speak about me.

“Aubrey was a wonderful girl. She was smart, halfway through her honor classes before she’d even graduated from middle school. She was kind, everyone around town knew her as the girl who would pick up fallen tree limbs. Check on a neighbor, anyone in need.” A pause to sniffle. “Even though her disability made it hard for her, she never let it get the best of her.”

I chuckle at that. It did get the best of me. Landed me in a casket. How wrong they are. It consoles them though. It’ll be a laugh for me only.

My father is one of the people carrying the casket. They tread through the muddy ground, feet crushing the dew-jeweled grass. They lower it slowly, allowing my soul to exit the world more gently than my body did. My mother cries harder as they lay the casket in the ground and cover it with dirt.

I normally would hate the look of tears on my mother's cheeks. The way my father quietly hides his sob behind drenched tissues. I would have been angry about the dress they put me in. The way the cold seeps into my bones, creeping through my decaying skin. But I died one-hundred-four hours ago.

And dead girls don’t care.