Opening Lines: Love, the Dead

Some people think that all of my writing revolves around death. I say that they’re completely wrong. Here’s the opening lines from a short story I’m working on at the moment. It’s about what life would be like if death wasn’t such a big deal.

See?

It kind of freaked me out the first time Drew showed up.

“Pizza yo,” he said when I opened the door.

I’d taken the box from him before I noticed. Not that I wouldn’t have taken the box from him if I’d noticed first. “You’re dead, right?”

“Sure,” he said easily, “You got a problem?”

“No, man. How much?” We get a lot of that now, but Drew was the first that I’d met, and I tried to play it low-key. “You’re the first dead guy I met.”

“’S an honour.” He bowed low, and I wondered if he’d been able to bow like that when he was alive.

I suddenly realised that with the pizza box in one hand and my beer in the other, I was going to have difficulty paying. “Listen, you want a beer?”

“Nah, man, I got like a dozen deliveries to make. Gotta roll.”

“Cool. Hey, listen, did you get any problems with that gig?”

“Nah man. They were civil. This was my old job, you know – before.”

“Hey, right. Give me a second to get the cash.”

“No es un problema.”

I headed for my bedroom, looking for somewhere to put down the beer and/or the pizza. From somewhere in the apartment came the sounds of Erin going about Erin business. She was humming, that humming she does that’s more like singing, or shouting, depending on how you look at it, or listen to it. Drew stayed outside, which was good ‘cause I don’t know how she’d be reacting to a dead guy in the apartment, but when she came out of her room, of course the first thing she said was, “Holy shit, that guy’s a zombie!”

“Erin!” I hissed, feeling like maybe I should put the pizza down on her, except it would be a waste of a Pepper and Pepper Ronnie Special.

“Hey, uh, we don’t – you know, we don’t like that word,” called Drew from the hall.

“Great, now you’ve pissed him off,” I whispered, but he heard me too.

“Nah, man, it’s cool. Lotta people don’t get it. We just got to educate, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” said Erin, still worried that he might bite her head off, metaphorically speaking. Or possibly literally. “I’m sorry.”

“Serious, it’s cool. You got those bills for me yet?”

“Here you go,” I pushed the money at him, even though I wasn’t sure how, because I was still holding the beer and the pizza. He counted it off and looked up at me with a lop-sided grin and one eye, which I only just noticed. I pointed up, “They let you drive with just the one eye?”

“Stereo vision is over-rated. Anyway, I got GPS in the car. Thanks, man,” holding up the cash and retreating down the hallway. I shut the door behind him and blew out a breath with the O-mouth.

Erin popped up in front of me and grabbed the pizza box. “Did you ever get the feeling – like somebody just walked over your grave?”

“Hardy-fuckin-har. Wow. That was weird, right? That was weird.”

“He seemed cool.”

“No, he seemed cool. I didn’t mean him personally. But shit, he’s dead.”

“They’re all dead these days.”

She was right.