Fiction from Sarina Bosco

Photo: Paolo Chiabrando

Somnolence

The last of the snow melted over a week ago and when I go outside to give the yard and garden a once-over, I can see Will’s knuckles sticking up out of the dirt. Curled under like the translucent Indian Pipe that ruptures out from the blankets of pine needles back in the woods.

When the snow went, it went so quickly that it carried a layer of dirt with it, and now things from seasons ago are exposed. The shovel, in two moldering pieces, laying near a sapling. A t-shirt that I took off on a humid day and forgot to retrieve. The wiry, dull husks of gypsy moth cocoons dappling a maple. And Will’s knuckles.

I feel bad leaving him exposed like that but there’s not much else I can do. It’s still getting down into the twenties at night and the dirt is fractured into little frost heaves. Trying to kick it up now will just bruise my toes.

When Will first died, ten years ago this last February, we all carried him around for months. We were young and he was our first and none of us knew what to do or how to cope. It was both embarrassing and terrifying.

Most of the girls were dragging him around under the armpits those days, struggling but happy to have something to cry over and work at. I mimicked the boys instead and hauled him over my shoulder with his toes tapping the back of my thighs. He was surprisingly short, for being such a Casanova.

I used to bring him to work with me and prop him against tomato boxes. Sometimes the smell of bread proofing would spin me back to the morning he died in the ICU.

Who ever thinks they’ll go that way? Bleeding from the stomach in a bowling alley parking lot. Who ever plans that?

It was so fresh that first year that I’d get mad and kick the mop bucket. But I never brought him home with me. Some sane part of me realized that having my dead friend hanging around while I napped or made lunch wasn’t healthy.

Then last summer I saw him at a bonfire. They were tossing empties at his feet, laughing and making out. His pant leg caught fire and no one batted an eyelash. It’s funny, the things you forget you carry with you, or take for granted.

I marched into the crowd, dragged him out, threw him in the back of the Honda, and drove home. But I couldn’t bring him inside, so I buried him out back.

His knuckles are so pale.

It’s all I can think about for the rest of the day. In the end I take the new shovel and dig him out.

—§—

I wake up at 4AM and his body is in the bed next to me, clad in that worn out t-shirt and the Carhartt jeans. Even the steel toed boots, fashionable back then because no one our age was doing any hard labor.

Will’s chest is smaller than I remember it being. There was that summer when the girls in the group gathered on a tattered blanket at the town green and watched the boys play tug-of-war, shirtless. Their taunt muscles stirring something in us that was mortifying and delicious.

Now I glance over at his still body without moving and think of him more like a son. Maybe the son I’ll have one day. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. There’s an extra bedroom upstairs, and so many kids in the foster system. Of all the things I can do, I’m not sure my body will endure pregnancy and childbirth.

Is this what my son will look like? Maybe when he sleeps. Will’s chest doesn’t rise with breath. I let my wrist roll over limply and graze his forearm. The skin is cold and stiff and clammy at all once, and for a moment panic surges in me at the realization that I’m in bed with a dead body. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been carrying him around for all of these years, literally slogging his ungiving flesh up against my own.

The first blush of dawn tinges the room gray. I stare at the ceiling until the panic ebbs and my own breathing slows to something close to somnolence.

The truth is, I never had the chance to be afraid of death because there wasn’t a clear line where life ended and it began. None of us were given even a second to adjust to the sudden shift between burying hamsters in shoeboxes and burying friends we’d grown up with.

I wonder if I’ll wake up with him in my bed again tomorrow.

When it’s lighter out, I’ll get up and take him back out to the garden, and maybe prop him up in one of those wrought iron chairs that are sitting under the cigar tree. But until then I’ll let him stay. He isn’t really here, after all, and I’m not sure if that makes me lonely or just alone.
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Sarina Bosco is a chronic New Englander. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She’s a supporter of the serial comma.