The "Death" Book

By Blaise Marcoux

A man on the road tries not to think of the corpse he's seen. A being waits for the end of the world to insult the one who broke its heart. A woman is haunted by a constant follower. A nerd confesses to a dying comic book company. Seven stories and free-form interludes about death, some more literally related than others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blaise Marcoux
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310945632

Blaise Marcoux

Blaise Marcoux is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer whose short stories have been published in Bewildering Stories, Title Goes Here, Comma, Splice, and through Short Story Press. He attended Kansas University majoring in Creative Writing, where he wrote and drew the comic strip “Cool Thing” for the campus newspaper. He also won the Edgar Wolf award in fiction from the university for his story “Left in Transition.”

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The Death Book

By Blaise Marcoux

Copyright 2014 Blaise Marcoux

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Collective Thought (Verse)

The Well-Intentioned Path (Verse)

The Mistake Is Permanent, And A Decision Is Made (Prose)

Transitory (Verse)

The Sadducee (Prose)

Neighbors (Verse)

The Tangentials (Prose)

Rumors of War (Verse)

He Doesn’t Talk Like A Child (Prose)

This Isn’t Even Happening (Verse)

Hellbound (Prose)

Aokigahara (Verse)

Cold, Cold Air (Verse)

In The House Of The Usher Of The Fall (Prose)

Dirigible (Verse)

Ghost Ode (Verse)

Domicile Recluse (Verse)

To Aimery (Prose)

Acknowledgements

About The Author

COLLECTIVE THOUGHT

How long, just how long

Till you sink and join the squids

The wrecked luxury flagships

Can you breathe underwater

And will you remember

When you chew cud and a Hindu

Combs your back hairs, how

You came to be here

I wish I could say and speak

My intonated feelings

And you will piece out my life

Through Alzheimer ramblings

You’ll think I had feathers

Mixed with my scales, you’ll think

I never knew passion, and the human condition

Is all relative

When your skull joins the others

And your eyes feed the guppies

You’ll see

We’re not all that different

THE WELL-INTENTIONED PATH

This is who I really am, broke and grubby hands

Stoked, but not as an euphemism

More of a fluid flim-flam

More of a big mistake, irrevocable

And a decision is made

More of a tyrant in an angelic guise

But why assume an abuse of power

Is an automatic evil

It’s the well-intentioned path

You hear me talking about

You see me walking on

THE MISTAKE IS PERMANENT, AND A DECISION IS MADE

Dead bitch.

Dead bitch in the roadside gutter flooded with rain water that has slick oils curving in its flow which glimmer when lightning cracks open the sky that’s been dark all day because the calendar insists the winter solstice is coming even though it’s raining and not snowing. That kind of dead bitch.

Dead bitch with lips open in faint horror but not agape enough to be a true screaming portal that lets you see her tonsils and cavities and shit. Not that kind of dead bitch. Just a dead bitch with her lips somewhat apart, enough to whisper something hoarse.

She’s very dead. I urinate in the ravine across the street from her dead bitch body, the wet wind smacking around my yellow jacket. I bought the jacket because it reminded me of Maine fishermen, how they are on television and in watercolor paintings, always the yellow jackets. Never purple, never blue, always yellow. I don’t get it either.

I think it’s so their fellow fishermen can see them in storms or so a rescue helicopter can find them if they get blown out to sea and into the Atlantic’s waves because it’s always the Atlantic and never the Pacific. But I don’t believe that for a second because a fiery red would do the job just as well in my opinion. Nothing contrasts the blues and grays of a maritime storm like a red would.

I get back in my truck and start driving down the highway again.

Dead bitch.

Dead bitch with her legs slightly apart in a way that doesn’t invite rape and doesn’t seem sexual even though the legs are bare and have scratches on them that aren’t sexy at all. Deep scratches that leak out blood into the oily water that flashes when electricity dances across the sky.

I never turn on the radio these days. Music isn’t good anymore, and I don’t mean the style or the lyrics. The entire concept of music seems like a children’s game. Gyrate to the noise filtering out of the speakers because your kindergarten teacher told you to. Dance, kiddies, dance! I don’t like it. The raindrops smacking into my windshield and the wiper blades screeching across the glass could be considered music, but I don’t think so.

I stay thoughtless, just driving, and if I have to think, I recite Bible verses. My favorite book is Joel. No one else likes it. Just me. And all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth out of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds meaningful. It deals a lot with water, and I drive through a lot of storms.

Dead bitch with no cigarette burns on those bare legs or on her blank dead face or on her arms where the sleeves are rolled up so the freckles on the back of her arms can be seen through the surging rush of polluted gutter water streaming over them.

Freshly dead. Somehow, I know.

I park at a rest stop. Eyelids need a rest. She was probably killed by a truck driver much like me who thought she was a slut on the side of the road who deserved to get slaughtered like a fattened pig even though he was going to enjoy her first and wouldn’t with a farm animal per se. Maybe pornography wasn’t good enough for him. I’ve never glanced at the stuff even once.

As I fall asleep, I think about why I didn’t call the cops. Not like no one ever drives on this highway. And besides, how good would it look if a trucker called in a murdered girl? The cops would ask me where I was driving from, and I’d tell them. They’d ask where I was going, and I’d tell them that too. They’d ask where I lived, and I wouldn’t tell them because it’s none of their business. They’d take me down to their station just for chuckles. My court-appointed lawyer would mess up the trial because attorneys are universally incompetent. I’d go to jail and get shanked, again, for chuckles. Chuckles and chuckles and chuckles.

And one dead fucking bitch.

When I wake up, I decide that she probably deserved it. Probably blackmailed a husband with two kids and a good wife with pictures of a bad night because the bitch needed heroin money. She was pale after all, though that could have been because of the frigid, damp elements. So not a drug addict, just a shrew, a dream killer who double-timed her husband and left her two kids without food all day back at the house while she whored around on the highway until her husband in disguise picked her up and made sure she became a dead bitch in the gutter who would start rotting away soon.

I get back on the road.

Who leaves their dead victim out in the open anyway? What a cad. Might as well string her up on a tree in front of a courthouse and set her on fire with your name and address carved on the accommodating bark. If I had killed her, I would have jammed her dead body in between the crates resting in the back of my truck and would have stopped at a hotel so I could bathe her body in lye. That’s what they always use on television, lye. I don’t know why either. I guess it’s the only dissolver of organic compounds in the universe.

My head feels heavy with exhaustion, so I recite some Joel verses. For he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month. All the rain and talk of rain and drunken coffee makes me need to urinate again. I pull over at a gas station and relieve myself.

When I leave the restroom, I decide to fill my coffee thermos again. As the black liquid dribbles into my container, I spot a man eying the Ding Dongs, deciding if he wants one or not. He’s the only other customer in the store. He could be the killer. He has stubble over his perfectly round jaw, and his head is meticulously shaved bald. He wears a Carhartt jacket and grubby faded jeans. Peeking out from under his jacket is a simple navy tee-shirt.

If he killed her, he did it by picking her hitchhiking ass up at the base of an onramp. After a couple miles, she accuses him of making a pass at her, but he just shrugs and smiles because he’s easy-going like that. True, he’d hoped for some action, all of us truckers do in those situations, but he doesn’t expect it. She accuses him of rape even though he hasn’t moved an inch towards her, so he doesn’t take kindly to that and kills her.

No, he looks smart enough to not leave a dead body out in the open. I get back to driving.

Dead bitch in the bad weather who could’ve been a rotting deer that I mistook for a murdered girl because my eyesight is bad and lightning can play tricks on you. Maybe I just saw a mess of branches in the ditch that looked like a clawed-up corpse. Maybe I just saw a girl sleeping with her eyes open and staring emptily into the darkened sky. A day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness. Maybe there was a car wreck earlier, and the clean-up crew cleared the vehicle’s mess but forgot the body.

There’s a hitchhiker thumbing for a ride up ahead. A young woman, but not a girl, her windbreaker whipped around by the soggy breeze, her face weary and wet. The handwriting on the sign at her feet is messy and unfeminine. I ask her where she’s headed. She’s annoyed that I can’t read her sign. I repeat my question. She tells me she’s going to a town forty miles away.

After she gets into my truck, she rips her jacket off, spraying water all over everything. She wipes her stringy hair away, allowing me a better look at her ho-hum features. After a couple miles, she asks me to turn on the radio. I do, and she switches it over to a country station. She still hasn’t fastened her seatbelt.

Dead bitch lying in the gutter who sits up and asks me in her raspy dead voice why I’m standing there ogling her shredded naked legs. I get angry and remind her that dead people don’t talk. She stands up, and a mouthful of blood pours through her lips. She takes a step towards me. A lurching, unnatural, menacing step.

The hitchhiker girl chants softly along to all the radio songs. Even breathy and low, her singing voice is terrible, a strangled off-key failure of a croon. She sways forward and back to the tunes’ rhythms like a child with something mentally wrong with her, like a dog woozy with rabies. She gets angry when a weather warning interrupts her programming.

I wonder aloud if all the flash flooding alerts are why there’s so few cars on the road. She doesn’t respond, moody without her soundtrack.

Dead bitch who lies next to me in our bed at our cabin out in the mountains. She’s not dead yet, and I haven’t bought the cabin yet either. She rubs the balding spot in my hair and grins, her