My fingers trembled as I slid them across the dialpad of my cell phone, slick with blood, the same blood that coated my fingers and stained my parka and jeans. It painted the dried brown autumn leaves in crimson and soaked the dirt and pebbles. Above, stringy pink clouds wisped across a deepening blue sky. I smelled smoke from rising from the chimneys of houses across the street, fireplaces lit as dusk approached. The first ring was interrupted by 911 dispatch.
“911, where is your emergency?”
My voice cracked. “Reynold’s Park, DeBorgia. At the quarter mile marker.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“There’s been a murder.”
“Are you sure the victim is dead?”
“There’s so much blood.” I let out a choked sob.
“Who is the victim?”
“Me,” I said. Then came the pause. I wanted to give them my name, Dorothy Young, but even without considering the repercussions, I decided it would’ve been unwise.
“I’m sorry ma’am? I’m not sure I heard you correctly. Who is the victim?” I looked at the pile of leaves where my killers tried to hide my body.
“A young woman,” I said, “about 29 years old.” I imagined her clicking away at her computer, entering the information I gave her.
“We’ve actually received numerous other calls from locals in that area. Officers are already on their way and should be arriving any minute. What is your name ma’am?”
“I’m nobody,” I muttered as I lowered the phone and pressed the end call button. I doubt she even heard me. I felt a bit of sadness when I said this.
At 17 I remember thinking I knew exactly who I was, the college I wanted to go to, the boys I wanted to date and the ones I just wanted to fuck. But after high school graduation, I never lived in the same apartment for more than a few months, even when I was in college. I spent most of my adult life sleeping on friends’ couches promising to get back on my feet. It takes more than a few months to rebuild a life with nothing, hardly a working cell phone, just a box of clothes and a couple stacks of books. My car was the only thing that possessed any real value and for awhile it was my home. I knew given the opportunities I could start building my foundation for a stable life, but people lacked the patience these days and roommates had expected me to become stable and wealthy in seemingly just a few weeks. Everyone wants instant gratification and no one understands better than I that these things took time. More than just a few months, quite possibly a year if not longer. The only ones who understood this were people like me who had practically nothing. When I persuaded someone to let me stay with them until I got back on my feet, I ferociously competed for jobs and after a couple weeks, when work became steady, and I could finally start paying my share of rent and groceries, getting my life back together, my roommate would say: “It’s just not working out,” and then I was back out on the street.
I had lucked out when the previous tenant of my current studio apartment hadn’t paid her rent and the manager was in desperate need to find a new tenant right away. I happen to catch him as he was rushing out the door and agreed let me pay the security deposit in cash over four paychecks, which was the only way I could’ve afforded it. After 4 paychecks, two days after I paid of my deposit, I was fired from my job. I had paid my rent for this month fortunately, but had no clue what to do about next month. A dead woman can’t write a check, at least not legally.
I barely had time to move down the path when I heard the distant sirens rapidly approaching. I had to get out of here before I was spotted. How could I explain my bloodstained clothes? Or the lack of a body? I’d be arrested, detained, held until I gave them answers—answers I didn’t have, nor could I explain. I didn’t even understand it myself. How does a dead person suddenly wake up in the middle of the woods? Whoever arrived on the scene first would see the blood and immediately know no one could’ve survived with that much blood loss, so where’s the body?
There was so much blood on me it was impossible not to notice. They’d detain me and take samples from me and from my clothes and realize it was the same DNA as from the crime scene. They’d take me to the hospital, run tests, find that I had no heartbeat, but still had brain function and motor skills. I’d become some medical freak show.
I stayed crouched low, prepared to sweep through the bushes when my foot slipped in the dirt and I caught myself a tangle of blackened woody stems. I hardly noticed the thorn puncturing my thumb and when I plucked it out of my flesh, no blood spilled from the wound. None. Living people bled. Living people felt pain when they were injured, but I felt none. Just a slight bit of pressure until the thorn was removed.
When the sirens arrived, I heard several car doors slamming and a man speaking into a transmitter radio. Footfalls sounded from the path ahead, the crunch of sticks breaking under heavy boots, voices talking. They were coming. I needed to move, now.
Still low, I scampered across the path just as a group of officers emerged from behind a couple of black-barked trees, their eyes landing on the bloody patch of dirt and leaves.
A man, I presumed the detective, in a dark winter coat, with ashy blond hair, almost-but-not-quite old enough to be my dad, and not entirely unpleasant looking, raised the radio transmitter in his hand to his mouth. He gestured to another officer who immediately began to unroll yellow tape that read crime scene do not cross.
I can’t tell you how surreal it feels to look at your own murder scene, or what it’s like to see so many official men and women promptly rushing about and making a fuss over you as if you were Angelina Jolie when moments ago you’re life was shit. 29 years of bleak living—no, not living, merely existing—and in one instant you’re suddenly everybody’s highest priority, like the guest of honor at some elite party. Not that elite, I decided, death is an event with mandatory attendance. Except for me. It was an event clearly not invited to.
In a natural world the officers and homicide team would’ve found my body lying face up with my jeans and panties pulled down around my ankles and my parka ripped open, shirt torn exposing my cold, dead breasts to the raw October autumn air, and my round and boyish-looking facial features turned grisly pale and pulled tight across my bones. Upon closer inspection they would’ve discovered a dozen stab wounds in my back and torso, deep cuts in my leg from running through the brambles as I tried to flee from my attackers, and antemortem bruising from when they caught me and I tried to fight them off. More bruising on my neck from where their hands squeezed off the air circulation between my lungs and my brain, a few broken ribs, bruising of my cervix, my sphincter only millimeters from being torn apart, and the final blow of a rock to my skull that would’ve ended it all.
Instead, I had been omitted from the natural order of things for some reason, perhaps my last words, a breathless curse, a promise of revenge that I would make them pay for what they’d done. Death had granted me another chance. I’d missed a lot of opportunities in life, but now I was dead and this was one opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up. Someone killed me and I was going to find them. And then I would make them pay.