Excerpt: We Pull the Dead

The corpse, I noticed with increasing alarm, had begun to sag significantly. "No, no, no, Sir, please, don't," I said, beginning to lose my control. "We can sort this out. You must listen to reason. You no longer have family here. They have said their goodbyes. They would not want to see you this way. You have nothing here. You need to move on now, it is much better there, trust me, Sir, just look at all those colors, I --"

The corpse had, with some struggle, turned itself completely around. I knew the rules. No touching. No pushing. No pulling. No one had mentioned cajoling, bribing, and outright lying, but I could not picture my father doing any of these things. No, something had gone terribly wrong, and I didn't know it yet.

"Listen! Sir! I changed my mind. I - I - I can help you get back to ... to whatever you wanted, uh want!" I said, the command in my voice present, to my relief. Jarred, the corpse started the laborious shuffle backward to face me. Maybe his capacity for reason was shot, I thought. Maybe ... maybe ...

"You are going the wrong way," I said. "The return to life is this way."

He stared at me through the puffed slits of his wrinkled eyelids, and for a moment I wondered whether the undead thing I was looking at had the capacity for thinking at the level of a man, a small child, or a cow.

"See the path?" I said. I felt my features twist into the terrible grin of a monkey, the same grin that occurred whenever I felt myself pulled into a dishonest, stupid, or otherwise useless venture. I hoped the man-corpse standing before me would not notice. "It ... it leads back to your house. You have to follow me, though. Otherwise you will be lost forever in the desert."

The corpse looked at me with the deadest skepticism I had ever seen.