The Newly-Dead

I died yesterday for no apparent reason; just watching an episode of The Simpsons when a flash went off in my head, followed by an intense white pain. I gasped, trying to sit up and I spilled my cup of tea onto the floor. I fell to my knees, clutching my head. The last thing I heard was Ned Flanders saying “Hi Diddly Ho, Neighbouroonie!”

Everything went blank for a while, and I was swimming in a thick sea of nothingness, before light slowly started to shimmer and my hearing returned.

I was still lying on the ground, unable to move. I tried to blink, to breathe, but there was no response. For an eternity I must have waited.

After a while, The Simpsons ended and the news came on and I heard the front doorbell ring. Footsteps. Then a scream. My wife of five years came into my line of vision, her face a seething mass of panic, she slapped me a few times and pressed her fingers into my neck, checking for a pulse.

“What’s wrong. Oh no. Please don’t die, oh dear God, WAKE UP!!

Her hand wiped under my nose and when she brought her hand up to her face, I could see it was stained with blood. She got up and her knees popped like someone stepping on a dry twig. She ran out of the room and I blacked out for a second, then I heard her screaming into the phone. “I think he’s dead. He isn’t breathing. Please get somebody here to help!

Dead?

Sadness swept over me in huge waves. I tried my hardest to get up then, to go to her, wrap my arms around her, to give her the comfort she so desperately needed. My awareness of everything around me was muted, grey. She came back into the room and switched the television off. She picked me up and held me to her. Stroked my hair. I couldn’t smell the perfume she always wore.

*     *     *

They half-rolled, half-lifted my body onto the stretcher to take me away. The real terror began when they pulled a heavy white sheet over my head.  I tried to struggle, to escape the courseness and stuffiness of the sheet. I could hear the muffled cries of my wife, she was being comforted by a policeman who wouldn’t have looked out of place on a magazine shoot. A real pretty boy.   As the ambulance drove away, they didn’t put the sirens on. There was no need.

And now here I lie, waiting. The sheet was pulled off moments before, my eyes dazzled by the neon lights.

“Male, thirty three years of age, weighs 85 pounds exactly. Small abrasion on right temple. Must have done that when he collapsed.”

I banged my head? Can’t remember that.

“Okay. Here we go. Incision made from sternum to crotch, opening up. The lungs are clear, no signs of disease or scarring. Can you weigh these please and record?”

Oh f**k. I see him lift out my lungs. I try my hardest to force some air into them, even though they are now being carried away from my body.

“The heart has slight fatty build up over the left ventricle, well that could have given you a shock in a few years or so boy. Liver, slightly deteriorated, the kidneys look overworked.”

I can’t do anything but look in horror as my various organs are removed from my body and given to a slight man with blue eyes and a green mask covering his mouth.

“Okay, can you pass me the bone saw?”

The screaming wail of the saw hitting my skull would make me want to puke ordinarily. After a while, he lifts off the top of my skull and places it somewhere to the left of me. I wish I could move my head to see.

“We have the cause of death. Massive bleeding to the frontal lobe, death would have been pretty much instantaneous.”

After a while they are finished. I can’t understand why I can still think, even though I cannot feel. I’m deader than a f*****g dodo.

*     *     *

“What do we have here? Oh yes. Daniel Rajapakse. What kind of package is he getting?”

“He is getting the Raymond deluxe. That boy has good insurance cover.”

“And clothes?”

“The wife brought them in earlier. Black suit, silver shirt.”

“Okay, split the clothes down the back and get a pair of shoes from the cupboard. Size nine. Then we will get the coffin. Open or closed viewing?”

“Closed. The family are Protestants.”

*     *     *

I try to scream as they lower me gently into the coffin. The lid gets attached. Darkness again.

Muffled music plays. Just a Closer Walk by Jim Reeves. Then a man’s voice: “Daniel will be remembered for his kind nature and lust for life. He will be missed by all, his family and his wife Lisa, who is expecting their first child”

If my heart hadn’t been ripped out of my body, it has been now.

A thump. I try to struggle out of death as the first clumps of soil land on the coffin lid. I scream a soundless scream.

Trapped here, for eternity.