Where the Violets Grow

Chapter 7- What We Bury

“I have to do what?” I ask incredulously.

“Yep,” Daniel’s apparition says matter-of-factly. “Bodies don’t just stay pretty forever. It’s going to start rotting, and I’ll be damned if I’m found decomposing in my own house because my girlfriend was too stupid to give me even a half-decent burial.”

Daniel glares at me with contempt.

“You made this mess,” he says bitterly. “Now you need to clean it up.”

I move through the house in a haze. I don’t know if it’s because of the pills, the alcohol, or maybe just plain shock, but I can’t feel anything. I’m aware of my footsteps carrying me toward the back door, of my hand turning the knob, and of the rush of cool air against my face.

The backyard is a motion picture with several frames missing. Everything passes in a blur as I stumble across the yard and into the tool shed.

I grab a shovel, but it feels like it weighs two hundred pounds. I struggle to drag it from its rusted hook on the wall until it finally crashes to the floor. The handle vibrates painfully in my hands from the impact.

“If you don’t watch where you’re swinging that thing, we’re both going to need holes dug,” Daniel grumbles. “And I sure as s**t am not sharing with you, you stupid little viper.”

Breathing hard and definitely against my better judgment, I turn to glare at him.

“I may be a stupid little viper, but at least I’m still breathing,” I snap.

His mouth snaps shut.

I’ve never spoken to him that way before.

We stand in awkward silence for a moment before I return to my task.

“Sorry,” I say softly.

“Whatever,” he mutters.

I drag the shovel to the middle of the yard and hear Daniel—or rather his ghost or whatever he is— heave an exasperated sigh.

"Not the middle of the yard, i***t!" he snaps at me. "Pick somewhere that wouldn't look suspicious if the ground was disturbed." He scans the yard and lands on a spot beneath the back of the house.

"There," he says, pointing to my empty flower beds full of brittle, dead rose bushes and weeds. "You never did anything with them anyway."

Because you said it was a waste of time and money. I don't push my luck by saying it out loud, but I get the feeling that he knows what I'm thinking because he glares at me anyway.

“You didn’t have to kill me, you know,” he says, sitting on—or floating above—nothing. He folds his legs beneath him and watches me work.

I opt to stay silent as I begin the painfully slow work of digging up my old, dead rose bushes.

He drums his fingers against his knee as though he’s bored.

Bored of watching me dig his grave.

Beads of sweat roll down my face and back as I widen the hole and begin digging downward. The work is agonizing. Every part of my body is on fire, either from muscles I didn’t know I had or from the brutal beating I suffered what feels like a lifetime ago.

“You look gross when you sweat,” he says out of nowhere.

I don’t bite.

I keep digging.

Daniel heaves another dramatic sigh, and then I feel a cold draft of air.

I look up at where he had been only a second ago and find nothing.

Nobody.

Good.

Digging the grave takes hours. I had no idea how deep to make it when I started, so I decide to stop when the edge of the hole reaches my waist—partially because I’m afraid I won’t be able to climb back out if I go any farther.

I haul myself over the edge and check once more to see whether any of my neighbors have been disturbed by my devious work. Nobody peers over the privacy fence. Not even a dog barks in the distance.

Only the cicadas and my horrible deed disturb the otherwise peaceful night.

Getting Daniel’s body out to the grave is going to be an entirely different story. I realize this while standing at the foot of the basement stairs, after dragging him across the floor by his ankles.

He seems heavier now than he ever did alive.

Standing there while contemplating my options, I feel a now familiar cold brush of disturbed air on the back of my neck.

“Didn’t think about this part, didja?” Daniel’s apparition teases from behind me.

His transparent chin rests on my shoulder as though we’re friends instead of a couple divided by the cosmic boundary of death. I know I can’t touch him. I know he’s nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Still, I shove at him.

My hand passes through his chest in a rush of cold air. He flickers but doesn’t move, so I’m the one forced to step away and turn to face him.

“What do you suggest?” I’m too tired and burned out by the events of the day to care about my pride. I’m far past the point of trying to preserve my moral character, especially with the weight of this secret resting entirely on my shoulders.

Daniel stares at me in bewilderment. Then he throws back his head and laughs. He actually laughs at me. He doubles over, pretending to be breathless.

“You’re asking me for advice on how to dispose of my own body?” he manages between fits of laughter.

I throw my hands up in exasperation. “You told me to dig the hole!”

“You’re the reason we’re in this mess!” he fires back.

“You’re the one who can’t control your temper!” I yell.

His expression sobers up instantly. "Couldn't," he corrects me. "I couldn't control my temper. Now, I never will."

His cloudy eyes lock onto mine.

"Because you killed me, Lucy."

The last sentence feels like another punch to the gut.

That was his love language after all.

I release the breath I've been holding for the last thirty seconds and get to work.

First, I try simply dragging him up the stairs by his feet, but his shoulders keep catching on the bottom step. I put his legs down and shuffle to his upper body. Then I try sitting him up and looping under his arms, like I've seen firefighters do on television.

His weight and my injuries send us both crashing back to the floor, and I have to scurry out from under him.

All the while Daniel's ghost floats above me with his head propped up in his hands and ankles crossed in the air behind him like a teenager watching their favorite television show rather than a dead man watching the woman who killed him repeatedly fail to haul his corpse up a flight of stairs.

I crawl a few feet away and sit down to catch my breath. Every part of my body screams in agony. My ribs burn as though a knife is twisting between them. Pain pulses through my face and skull, and the room spins around me like a never-ending carousel.

“I told you to lay off the sweets, Lucy-Goosey.”

Daniel sounds bored. Smug.

Anger flares through my veins so fast that my head snaps up.

“f**k you, Daniel!” I scream.

He stares at me with shock, amusement and a twinge of anger in his eyes, but he says nothing. I don't give him a chance to. I stand and I storm over to his body and I start repeatedly kicking it in the shoulder, chest, and head.

"You always have something horrible to say," I begin to yell at him. "Even when I do everything right, you never even bothered to say thank you or show me any kind of appreciation!" I punctuate the last sentence with one last kick to the chest that makes a wet crunching sound.

I stand there with my chest heaving and my hands shaking. The crushing weight of everything that's happened— Daniel's abuse, his last attack, and the terrible thing I've done to him, comes crashing down over my head. I collapse onto my knees by his body in silence, burning tears streaming down my cheeks.

After a while, Daniel speaks up again.

"Are you done?" Now he just sounds annoyed. "Because the sun is coming up soon and you still have to deal with that." He waves a hand at his body half-propped up on the stairs. "You can have your boo-hoo show and pity party afterwards. But for now, you need to do us both a favor and suck it the f**k up."

I stare at him, unsure of how to respond.

He rolls his eyes. "I was an asshole. You killed me. The field is level. Now get off your ass and take my body outside!"

At first, I contemplate lying on the floor out of spite. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm done.

But as nauseating as it is, he is right.

I force myself to stand up and I walk over to stand over Daniel again. There are deep purple splotches from where I had kicked him before. I feel a habitual twinge of guilt and I kneel down to caress his cheek.

"I'm sorry," I whisper.

"Would you get moving?" Daniel yells from the other side of the room. "Illegal corpse disposal now, apologies later. Move."

I loop my arms under his again and drag him off the stairs so I have room to go up and grab a sheet from the laundry room. I twist it up until it becomes a satisfactory rope and I loop it around him in an amateur harness to use as leverage.

Daniel looks at me like I'm an absolute i***t.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Will you please be patient and let me concentrate?" I snap back at him.

Daniel holds his hands up and remains quiet as I tie one more knot over his chest and grab the two improvised straps on his shoulders and pull as hard as I can. His body starts to slide up the stairs with a little bit more leverage than before.

The journey to his grave takes forever. I stupidly apologize each time Daniel's head cracks against a step, or any time that I lose my grip and dropped him. All the while Daniel's commentary never stops.

"You break it, you buy it."

"Oh yeah, one more scratch won't matter."

"Sure, we can just buff that one right out."

An eternity later, we are at the edge of the grave. There is a dark stain trailing along the grass from where I had dragged him through. Daniel stands next to me by his own body, finally silent.

"Well?" he asks expectantly after a minute.

I push his body with my foot and it rolls into the grave with a dull thud.

"How ceremonious of you," Daniel remarks flatly.

"I'm sorry," I say for likely the hundredth time. "I didn't mean for it to happen."

"Yeah, yeah.." Daniel waves a hand dismissively. He looks down into the hole and for the first time since he died, he looks hesitant.

He looks afraid.

"Do you think I'm a bad person, Lucy?"

He sounds like a child, afraid and alone. He looks at me and I can almost swear that I catch a glimpse of tears.

"Where do you think..." his voice trails off.

I almost reach for him. But instead, I lower myself into the hole and kneel beside his body. Daniel's eyes are still open. Blue. Blank. Empty. A twist of pain tangles in my throat. I reach out and gently close his eyes.

"Goodbye Daniel," I whisper.