The Fear

I never thought I'd get the chance to find out, but the first reaction you have to a dead body is to poke it with a stick. It's the only thing you want to do. This is a person, this is someone's husband or wife or son or daughter or something, that all comes later. But at the moment of discovery, just like they said it would: I gotta get me a stick.

Now I had to decide where to place this poke. One choice—albeit one I got from a cartoon—is the eye. I imagined the squishy noise I hoped it would make, the person just staring blankly out. How often have I wanted to poke someone in the eye and I never could? This was my chance! The stomach is perhaps the most classic, either that or the shoulder. Nice, good areas to poke, soft or hard, you got a lot to work with there. Then there's the butt. Self-explanatory.

I chose the shoulder. I'm a chicken.

The body on its side, face toward the ground. I gave its left shoulder a poke, hard, but not too hard. I wasn't sure if I wanted it to fall back, see the face and everything. From this vantage point anything could have happened. It could have been cardiac arrest and that was it. But if the body fell back and I could see the face, and the eyes, and anything else that might be hiding. What if there was blood on the chest? I don't know what I would do.

I poked again. Definitely dead.

It was the body of a girl. The female equivalent of Tall, Dark, and Handsome. So maybe Tall, Dark, and Beautiful. Everything was black, black boots, tight black jeans, black leather motorcycle jacket. She had black hair, but it ended blonde before it hit the tips. It didn't look matted. It didn't look damaged. She was the kind of girl I would be afraid to talk to at a bar. She looked like it anyway.

There wasn't anything left to do really besides call the cops, which I didn't do. I thought about poking it some more, but I didn't see the point. I did think about calling the cops, but I wasn't sure how this would look. Some guy just randomly finds some dead girl and that's all folks? It never happens that way! I'm far too paranoid to think I wouldn't wind up in prison somehow. If I was scum I would have rifled through her pockets, touched her inappropriately, seen if she was still warm. I could have taken a picture but I didn't really want to remember her like this. It's not that I was sad. I wasn't sad. But I was a little upset that I wasn't sad. So I started to walk away, which is when she turned over.

That'll put the fear into a man.

I never turned around. I only heard her. I imagine that when I poked her shoulder that set off a slow chain of bodily events which merely took this entire time to knock her back. I didn't want to see if her lipstick matched her fingernails. If she looked like my sister. If she had black eyes and a broken nose. I didn't want to see her eyes at all. I didn't want to think she was alive, that she was struggling, that there would be soft streams of warm air on my cheek as I knelt over her. I didn't want to think there was something I could have done.

So I ran. I ran home, gripping the stick. I don't think I've ever run as fast or as hard in my life. I don't imagine I ever will again. It wasn't until I got home that I ever realized how many splinters I had in my hand.