ecstasy | corpse husband

chapter 12.

washington — north of seattle
day two

corpse doesn't rest for more than two hours.

his eyes open regretfully, the comfortable blackness of sleep escaping him until it's miserably out of his grasp.

he turns onto his back. the windshield of the van is dotted with rain drops streaking down through the fog, making it impossible to see outside clearly. he can vaguely make out that the grey sky is brightening, and he assumes it's dawn.

the air makes him shiver. he rubs his hands against each other, creating heat, and breathes onto them. his gaze flickers to the drivers seat, where he finds elowen asleep on her side, her hand balled into a fist by her head. he looks to the backseat then, and sees elijah sprawled across the backseat under the wool blanket from the trunk, also asleep.

he sighs and exits the car carefully.

If he wasn't already painfully awake, the crisp morning air does it for him. he looks up and down the road and sees no one. it's unnaturally quiet, the region isolated from people and noise, but he finds he doesn't mind. he likes being alone most of the time.

needs it, even.

he wanders into the forest beside the car, a good distance away but keeps the minivan in his vision. he takes in the clean smell of dew and rain, the softness of the dirt under his shoes, the look of moss growing on the bark of massive pine trees shielding away any light. and yet, as peaceful as the earth seems around him, his body feels as if a storm is brewing within.

this happens to him; he isn't surprised. there's a reason he doesn't have any close friends. a reason he doesn't keep in touch with his family. why he hasn't had a girlfriend since he was nineteen.

people exhaust him. people bore him. people are temporary.

and yet, there's a girl inside that van, sleeping soundlessly despite the circumstances, who's spoken more sentences to him than any one person in the past year. a girl who he finds dangerously riveting to hold a conversation with and tease; who he was unfathomably content to see when he turned around at the whole foods parking lot in the midst of his injury; who invited him into her van and seems to want to stick around.

it was only a matter of time, though.

he feels his throat beginning to close up, like hands he can't see are groping around his neck and staving off the oxygen from getting in.

corpse sits on the ground. he ignores that it's wet. he stares up through the pine trees. he closes his eyes.

he wants to scream.

the only thing that stops him is the knowledge that elowen and elijah are asleep in the van not too far away. he doesn't want to steal their sleep, doesn't want to raise questions, either.

it boils inside of him—threateningly, menacingly.

he feels out of touch. it was hard to believe anything was real anymore. hard to believe his situation at all, or how he'd gotten himself into it. wrong place at the wrong time. and even more dire, the things he has seen, endured, fought. they're nightmarish impossibilities, and yet he woke up from a dreamless nap.

in a matter of one day, the country failed its citizens. in a matter of two, people have failed themselves.

corpse and elowen had listened to the radio last night.

after the emergency alert, elowen figured it'd be a good idea to turn on the car radio and keep theirselves informed. the president had just been announced dead, news that shook the country by dreadful surprise. not even he had expected it; not so soon, at least.