Eliza



  Eliza

  A Short Story from The Dead Series

  by

  Wayne Haroutunian

  Copyright 2014 Wayne Haroutunian

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  ****

  Two halves make one whole. That beautiful whole is the soul we share. Take away one half. The remaining half can’t live; the remaining half is nowhere. There is only one place to go when there’s nowhere to go.

  But will death accept you? No, take away one half again.

  Eliza Morrisey used to believe that it would. She always hoped that death would understand love, but it doesn’t, and love doesn’t understand death, either. The two are polar opposites, like darkness versus sunlight, and when engaged in conflict, no one knows which will win. People sometimes feel nowhere in life, lost and lonely, paranoid, isolated and vulnerable, unstable and frustrated, withdrawn, with a hatred or apathy for the world, and a longing for the way things were and a worry for the days to come; and sometimes death seems like the only escape. Amid the chaos of life, the power of the human spirit is all you can hope for to save you. But too often it’s not enough; darkness always has a certain upper hand on spirit, and when love is lost in the wasteland, and loneliness clutches the spirit by where it hurts most, the way of darkness will beckon.

  She knew that people will always love life, and always say that we ought to continue living if somebody we love dies. But when it happens to two young people who make one whole, belief usually dies along with the half that was taken away, and sometimes it takes something very special to prevent the self-destruction of the remaining half.

  Eliza and her husband Space Radio Morrisey were walking home from a party on the night of April 30th. Her hand was in Space's. Her other hand waved goodbye to a pack of her friends who had just departed south down Airport Road. Eliza and Space were headed north on Airport, towards their new home.

  No one lived north on Airport.

  "See you in the dreams of the night, Mr. and Mrs. Morrisey!"

  Space threw his arm around Eliza's waist and lifted her above his head. "Now I've got you all to myself, Mrs. Morrisey!"

  Eliza screamed in excitement.

  They were still in high school — 18 years old— and now newlyweds. Pretty good. They didn’t know what was to be stolen from them.

  When Space reached the lights and cemetery at Airport Road and Highway 7, still carrying Eliza, he let her down on one of his knees and kissed her blood-red lips.

  "Ugh," he said, and made a sour face and spit into his shadow. "How many cigarettes did you smoke tonight?"

  "Just nineteen. Why?"

  "Your breath smells like you caught on fire and somebody put you out. And nineteen? Have mercy, star! I don't want you croaking on me in youth!"

  "Listen, star. Eliza doesn't die unless she says so."

  Space glanced up at the traffic lights. Still red. No cars in sight. For a moment he felt tempted to cross, but screwed it. He looked down at Eliza, combed his hand through the curls and shadows in her dark blond hair all held high like tree roots by bobby pins, hair ties and a rainbow of berets. "And tell me, my philosophizing wife, just when will that be?"

  Eliza kissed him, whispering, "Whenever you go."

  "Well I'm going out as an old man, with a hundred-and-one noisy grandchildren that love me only because I give them chocolate bars."

  Eliza laughed. A red beret fell out of her hair, causing a curl to fall into her eyes, eyes black with mascara. "A hundred-and-one it is, dear. We'll start when we get home."

  Space smiled and glanced up at the lights again. Red. "Well we won't have their grandmother smoking nineteen cigarettes a night."

  Eliza pushed him and stood to her feet. "Space, will you please lay off on the cigarettes? I don't want to tell you that I'll do whatever I want, because I love you and I do what we both want, but some things you've got to let pass. You know I don't smoke like Sandra and those bitches do. I only smoke when I'm nervous. Or when we go to parties. Like tonight."

  Space laughed. "What, so you can look co-o-ol?"

  Silence. Eliza stared at him with a cold expression.

  Then she smiled. She grabbed Space and hugged him. "You're the one who always makes Eliza feel cool."

  "Baby, I just don't want anything to happen to you."

  "Ya. Hell, at the speed we're driving, I'll end up crashing before you anyways."

  Space took her shoulders and stared her in the eyes. "Liza, you and I are driving in the same car. If one crashes, both die."

  Silence.

  Smiling, Eliza took him by his bushy, spiked hair and kissed his goatee. "I'm glad I'm driving with you. Don't worry about what my parents said about you; they're assholes. Either my mom's not in the same car as my father, or one of them doesn't know how to drive."

  The light turned green. Below, on the post, the digital picture of the hand changed to that of a little person walking.

  Walk.

  Eliza and Space Radio Morrisey took each other's hands.

  Walk.

  They began to cross.

  A car exploded out of the distance. Speeding towards the intersection from west on Highway 7.

  With its headlights off, the car was black on black, like a shadow inside a shadow.

  Eliza screamed. Her hand ripped free of Space's grip and flew to her wide-open mouth.

  Space charged into Eliza like a rocket, knocking her off the road. When she fell to the curb, she looked up.

  The speeding car collided with Space at the waist. In a hollow silence, Eliza heard the soft, sad whistling of the wind followed by harsh snapping of bones. Like a slow rocket, the body of Space flew across the front hood, and—his arms reaching forward, his mouth open, his eyes open, staring in shock at Eliza one last time—he crashed into the front windshield.

  The vehicle continued speeding up Highway 7 until it swerved into a roadside tree, where the collision split its front hood in two. Maple leaves fell from the tree. Wind carried a discarded newspaper up the street and blew it underneath the car. The car began to spill glittering gasoline.

  Space had flown off the windshield and rolled twenty feet up the road.

  "NAAAAAAAOOOOOO!"

  Eliza ran for Space. She fell to her knees and drove her eyes up and down his wet, red body. His neck had been snapped, leaving his head tilted backwards to face with eyes closed the dark western sky behind him. The accident had uprooted his left arm and left it laying lazily on the road in an awkward position, hanging on only by the long flannel sleeve that once warmed it. His navy blue Storm Trooper t-shirt was now of a red Storm Trooper. Eliza sprawled herself over him and squeezed him with crushing force. She repeatedly cried no! no! no! which echoed all the way up Airport Road to their home and into their bedroom, where a framed wedding photograph fell from its mantle and busted on the floor.

  Her screams echoed into the sky. She banged his body against the asphalt as though it might wake him.

  Her screams echoed into his eardrums. She bent forward and screeched his name into his quiet ear.

  "Space!"

  Silence.

  She pressed her thumbs against his soaked eyelids and in forcing them open, cracked her press-on nails. Space stared blindly into the sky.

  "Honey, can you see me?" she said, choking on her words. "H-huh, star? It's Liza here to help you. Do you see who it is?" She shook him and raised her voice. "What do you see?"

  He continued to stare into the sky.

  Eliza broke into more tears. "Please
don't die on me. Please. Don't die, don't die, don't die on me. Don't die on me, Space!"

  One after the other, her tears splashed in his eyes, mixed with his blood. Gradually, her tears spread over and covered his eyes, just like the gasoline spreading over the road and around Eliza's knees.

  She noticed the gasoline, then looked back onto Space's eyes, which by now were as red as stoplights. She collected herself, then gently lay a long kiss on her husband's lips. Slowly she stood to her feet and turned towards the car wreck at the tree only so many feet up the road.

  She stared at it.

  Her fists formed knuckles. She walked to the car, pulling from her checkered dress a pack of king-size Du Mauriers. When she got to the driver's side door, she heard Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box howling on the radio inside and she found the mangled front seat filled up with an inflated air bag.

  She heard a single moan issue from somewhere beneath it all.

  Frowning, she put a cigarette between her lips and managed to push some of the air bag away to reveal a big fellow her own age whom she recognized from school: Brent Middlemiss.

  His left eye turned her way, and he grunted.

  "...help, m-my leg..."

  A rich smell of alcohol came with the grunt, and Eliza recognized it to be tequila.

  She pulled out a black Zippo lighter bearing an ace card from her dress pocket.

  "...please." Brent paused. He managed to frown. "Eliza...?"

  A tear fell down her cheek, but the cold wind picked it up and blew it away and rustled her hair. "Help you?"

  "Eliza?"

  "Help you?" she screamed. She yanked the cigarette from her mouth and punched the boy square in the eye.

  He groaned and his eye fluttered shut.

  "Wake up!" she yelled, and slapped him in the face.

  Brent's eyes flew open.

  Eliza held the cigarette to Brent's lips. Her own lipstick mark lay smudged on the yellow filter. "Take this."

  "Wh-wha...?"

  "Take it!" She pried his mouth open and shoved the filter in between his lips.

  Brent's swelling left eye turned and peered out the window. He saw the gasoline drinking the road. He looked at Eliza. "No, Eliza, no way." He dropped the cigarette.

  She took it and shoved it back in between his lips. "You keep that cigarette good and fucking tight. Pretend it's a dick. My boyfriend's dick ... the boy you killed tonight."

  "Sp-Space? I killed Space?" he muttered, shaking his head, cigarette dangling in his mouth. "No, I didn't kill anyone. Honest. Never killed anyone in my life."

  "You should have killed yourself, Brent, because now you're going to die a slow death, trapped in your car." Eliza snapped the Zippo open and flicked on the flame. It glittered in Brent's shaking eye.

  "No," he said, shaking his head, backing his head away. "No, God, no..."

  Eliza held the lighter's flame to the cigarette in his mouth. "Inhale."

  “No..." he mumbled. “Jeezus, no…”

  "Inhale, you murderer!"

  Brent inhaled and the cigarette lit. Sweat rolled down his quivering face, not in singular beads but in thin rivers.

  Eliza took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Any last words, Brent Middlemiss?"

  Tears flowed from his eyes.

  "Don't you dare fucking cry," Eliza said, tears coming from her own eyes with a steadily growing viciousness. "He was all I had left."

  Brent closed his eyes, cringing.

  Eliza socked him in the jaw. "And you killed him! Without killing me!"

  "No, Eliza," he said, grunting. "Th-think about what you're doing."

  "I'm going to live an eternal afterlife with my love Space. You're going to Hell. And if there's no Hell, Brent, you're going to live in eternal loneliness here on earth, because your body will burn forever, half-trapped to life, like one half of a whole."

  In tears, she turned and walked, very lady-like, to Space.

  She lay on him.

  "Two people, one car..." Holding the cigarette just inches above the flooded road, she took his red lips to her own red lips, and held on as tight as she could.

  Eliza dropped the cigarette.

  ****

  The Mulders—all three of Eliza’s family members—chose to attend the funeral. Their oldest daughter, Magdalene, had flown in from out east with her husband, whoever he was.

  May was not a month for funerals, nor was it a month for pale afternoons and delicate, cold rain. Over a hundred people, mostly students from school, attended; there were no classes that day.

  Space had no relatives that could have attended; no one knew much about him or where he had come from back in grade ten, not even Eliza. He had just blown into town. (And now, just blew out.) He had always kept his family and origin a secret, but promised to tell her when the time was right.

  Being dead, Eliza figured now was that time.

  “Space, are you there?”

  Blackness.

  “Space?”

  ****

  Eliza is screaming. The blue light of evening has fallen on the cemetery on Airport. Her screams burrow through the earth above and fill the murky air. They echo everywhere, for everyone and everything in the mountains to hear.

  Screaming.

  Her beautifully polished red press-on nails poke out from the steaming earth. Then her fingers, like the legs of a spider. A second set of fingers poke into the open air, and all of them begin to scratch wildly at the ground.

  She can breathe.

  Screaming.

  ****

  “Oh God…”

  Eliza, dirty as hell, wrinkled dress, mascara smudged over her eyes, lipstick smeared, braided hair half-unbraided and sticking in all directions. She looked like a demon.

  Waiting at the side of Airport Road, she held out her thumb. She had to find Space.

  THE END

  (for now)

  ###

  Discover other titles by Wayne Haroutunian

  Other Short Fiction Titles Available:

  The Last Streetcar to Somewhere

  Lukka Andorra (Beautiful Woman)

  The City

  Short Fiction Collections to come:

  The Dead Series, Book One

  The After the End Series

  Fantasy & Sci-Fi

  Novelettes & Novels to come

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