A Watty Award Winner, Trailblazer Category 2016
In 1896, dinosaurs started the infection that ended the world.
Carmen has lived her entire life in New York City, a city of opium and invention, of rotting tenements and marble mansions; a divided metr...
Written for the Dead Winter Anthology by TheCRYPTIC_
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St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowerie
New York City, Christmas Eve, 1895
In the Before
MY SHOVEL broke on the last chunk of dirt, and I chucked it out of the hole, tossing my coat up after it. My undershirt was black at the cuffs, faded to yellow from hours of the sweaty work I'd agreed to do for a thoughtless twenty dollars. (A sum I'd since reconsidered—somewhere between my first jab at the rock-hard plot, and the consequent snap of my only gerddamn shovel.) Snow drifted in matted clumps, oblivious, through the glow of the lantern above me; colliding with the freshly turned dirt piles and my over-warm skin; blanketing one surface and melting on the other. The air was sharp. Each inhale stabbed my chest and gutted my lungs like a hunting knife. Old boots, wilted flowers, and a hint of the tobacco tangled in my stretched scarf—That's how the fusty air smelled as I breathed it. And without my methodic digging, the winter silence it dwelt on chewed in my ear.
I cleared my throat.
Every joint popped as I squatted where I stood. My burrowing had uncovered a coffin, and I swept the remaining dirt crumbs away under the oxblood gloves protecting my hands. The wood beneath was frozen mid-decay. One more damp summer and the lumber would tear completely, easy as cheesecloth, but now it needed a good bootheel to buckle, and I kicked, welcoming the chance to stretch my sore legs. A person still existed inside the coffin. I was expecting bones, and it disturbed my focus long enough for my breath to escape—catching in the lamplight like wandering ciggie smoke—and then I was back at work, breaking into the last bed of a dead boy.
Snowflakes touched his face, too, and stayed; nestling in his empty eye sockets, collecting, unspoiled, on his shriveled skin. I fished him loose, folding him in half with a crack (for my broken shovel). His stale body swelled my burlap bag like I was Old Saint Nicholas bearing gifts, and I prepared to hoist him up and out of the hole when a wink of light stopped me. Across the burial ground, a red spark bobbed at a walker's pace, between rows of headstones and crude markers that blended into the night the farther they stood from me. My chest tightened. I dropped the bag. Grabbing my lantern I lifted the latch, snuffed the flame, and ducked; dragging my coat in after me.
The farmer searched for the fox, and here I hid inside the hen house.
Utterly cold now, I hunkered. Lying on my side in an opened grave, beside the bagged corpse. The coffin's soiled-silk lining was damp. I could feel it, breathing, through my clothes. And I waited. The copper's footsteps crunched in the steady silence, thunderous in my strained ears. I held my breath and counted:
