How to hide your own dead body

It became clear recently that I need to go to Hawaii this summer to see my son, help my mother move, get my cat, and bring Zenny back from visitation. The nightmares started again. 

To keep away from those thoughts, I put on audiobooks in the evenings and cut stencils out of wax paper with a utility knife, using them to paint designs on the walls of the shed. It looks like amateur crafts, because it is, but I like it anyway. Once I get some baseboards nailed down and a rug on the floor, the room might finally feel ready to use. It still smells like tobacco and night jitters, even after all the painting and cleaning. Smells are sticky. I’m going to carry the toaster oven over on the weekends and stick brownies and scones to the walls, instead. I’ll plug in the slow cooker and paint the ceiling with green curry and shoyu chicken. The ghost of Himself is going to have to get used to it, and stop smoking in my damn studio.

I painted the window while I was at it. I’ll scrape the sloppy bits off the glass with a razor later on.

Fog settled in on Saturday, and the birds went quiet. In the evening I walked down to the water and followed the shoreline, climbing over rocks and under fallen trees, thinking I probably should have told Zenny where I was going before wandering off into the mist like a character in a video game. There was no sound at all, even the water wasn’t talking. I passed two seagulls, and they stared at me judgementally until I was out of view, just crunching along loudly in big boots like the opaque silence wasn’t filled with hidden teeth. They were gone when I came back, my pockets filled with rocks and shells and shiny plastic, lugging an entire wooden door that someone had thrown off the cliff. It’s good wood. 

The fog cleared on Sunday, and the birds were hungry again. One of the crows has figured out that I’m not dangerous, and that I’ll come outside with nuts if he screams, “HEY STUPID I WANT SOME NUTS” when I pass by the window. The other crows sit at a safe distance and cuss him out when he packs the nuts in his beak like a kabob and takes them all. Fortune favors the assholes, crows. 

In the evening, I left Zenny playing Minecraft online with her brother and took a walk along the road, looking at the new three-story houses with tacky sentimental signs decorating the freshly painted porches, and the old one-story houses with rotting wooden palettes piled up against broken railings covered in decayed Christmas decorations. At the playground, I took a turn down a gravel path, which turned into old ATV trails through the woods. I followed them in loops that crossed themselves, over hills and around dense scrubby pine trees, thinking about how easy it would be to drop a dead body off the trail and into the thick bushes, where they would lie undiscovered for years while the occasional ATV rider rumbled by in the summer to go drink in the clearing and set off fireworks. Then I stopped and realized; I didn’t know which of the trails led back to the road, there were no shadows to judge direction by, and I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. I was one unexpected aneurism or forest madman away from being a body in the bushes, myself. Turning around, I retraced loops and tree stumps and old beer cans for another 15 minutes before I finally got back to the road and headed home. I picked up a few cans and bits of trash along the shoulder and threw them in my dumpster as I went inside, reminding myself to stuff some small trash bags in my coat pockets for next time. 

I feel better, with the birds and trees to keep me here, away from my old life. I’m going to have to face it again some time, but not right now.

Department of Teen Engagement: 

Zenny picked a dinner recipe, and we went to the store for ingredients to make calzones. I mangled the dough into discs, she stuffed them. On Sunday we came across a recipe for Future Brownies online, and went on a quest to find mochi flour. FAIL. There is no mochiko in all the Boot. Sent the recipe to Leif, and they got to eat them, instead. Goddamn it.

We are going to make regular brownies tonight.

What I’ve been reading:

6 Wakes, by Mur Lafferty. 5 clones on a deep space mission wake up with no memories, surrounded by their own dead bodies. One of them is the murderer. 

I Was A Teenage Slasher, by Stephen Graham Jones. A teenager loses his father in a gruesome accident, and a year later gets drunk at a high school party where everything goes horrifically wrong, activating a curse that brings the rules of every teen slasher film to life - and now he’s the killer.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. I don’t even know what this is about yet, I’ve just started it after seeing it recommended several times. Edit: I have no idea why this was recommended as a wildly funny and weird story. It’s just litRPG -  a game walkthrough. It’s like watching a 20 year old streamer play a video game. The “weirdness” is just video game humor, the characters are overwhelmingly male and stupidly violent, the female characters are bitches or pathetic losers. His cat co-player is a prissy bitch, the ex he reminisces about is a cheating bitch, the neighbor who yells at him is an old bitch, the women they encounter in the game are pathetic/gross/homeless or dead. I predict he will encounter his ex closer to the end of the game, she’ll be a manic pixie dream bitch, and the cat will win the game. I’m not finishing this thing. Listening to any comedy improv DnD podcast is better than this.

Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus. I don’t know anything about this one either, except that it’s horror and just won the Pulitzer. It’s got to be better than Carl.