There were few times in Arthur’s life that he had stopped to consider death. It had been something far off, an inconvenience he had heard of but was sure would never happen to him and even in his final moments there was a certain amount of denial, not hoping but knowing that someone would come to his aide. Those had been his dying thoughts, one last lie to carry him through the pain that was overtaking his body and he had whispered it quietly to himself over and over as though speaking the words enough time would grant it truth.
“It’s going to be alright, someone is coming. It’s going to be alright, someone is coming. It’s going to be alright, someone is coming.”
And he had continued with his empty promises until they began to fade into nothingness, speech replaced with endless mouthfuls of blood that trickled down his throat and filled his lungs to the bursting point. He was choking, sputtering out an alarming amount of the sticky red liquid so that his skin began to lose color, his eyes beginning to dim. It was freezing and he could feel a chill down to his very bones, using his last bit of strength to pull his knees to his chest. That was the end, he knew, and his eyelids fluttered shut so that he nearly appeared to be sleeping, save for the puddles of crimson surrounding his limp body. He was exhausted and the sensation of dying was almost exactly like falling asleep, a feeling of comfort embracing him and silently lulling him into a state of permanent slumber.
But that hadn’t been his demise, not truly, and when his eyes reopened it wasn’t his kitchen floor that he was lying on, but the battered mattress of a four poster bed, curtains drawn to reveal the details of his surroundings. It was a bedroom, most certainly, though it didn’t belong to Arthur and he was sure he had never seen it before. The furniture that filled the interior was exquisite, but caked in a thick layer of dust and the wallpaper which appeared to have once been rich and bright in color was muted and peeling now, chunks of wallboard missing behind it. That was how he would find all things to be here, a place where those dearly departed faced the next chapter in their existence; a eternity lived out amongst the dead.
It quickly became home, however, and Arthur adjusted as reasonably as he could to the gloomy tones that lingered about most everything he encountered in the city of corpses. Buildings had been left to decay, their great steel skeletons exposed beneath their crumbling skin, sidewalks and roads fractured but never repaired. Even the sky appeared to be in some state of mourning, ever overcast and gray, filled with great ominous clouds. Still, it was home, and he had made something of an after life for himself here, a place meant to mimic a life that had once been buzzing beneath his skin. Sure, there were kinks: limbs that had a habit of detaching themselves from time to time, a constant body temperature that never seemed to get above fifty degrees, the lasting taste of blood on his tongue but with a few years of existing this way under his belt, he had become something of an expert at dealing with the minor annoyances. It was dysfunctional and depressing, but he had managed to make it work.
He was dead, but he hadn’t lost his will to live.
And that’s how the days passed: Arthur finding ways to keep his left arm from going amiss, hours spent redecorating the humble apartment he had been assigned and trying to fight off inches of dust that seemed to keep reappearing. There were trips to the market to observe and sample the local curiosities or to collect a mildly fresh bouquet of nightshade in hopes of freshening up his residence. Causes of death were discussed with neighbors over tea, final regrets traded over endless bottles of liquor, and helpful hints on how to keep the ever present draft from seeping in through the cracks in the walls swapped. Day after day little changed but the population, the city limits always expanding to make room for newly buried members. In a way it had become dull, but Arthur hardly allowed himself to dwell on the monotony of his habitual lifestyle, focusing instead on making it from one moment to the other. It hadn’t been what he had expected, but it could have been worse.
Today happened to be no different from any other and when Arthur awoke from a very brief and most unsatisfactory slumber, he dressed him properly and set out to fulfill the usual tasks of his day. Breakfast consisted of some sort of amazingly hard scone and a simple black tea and he took his time in reading through the newspaper (which was mostly obituaries but mildly entertaining none the less.) which later became something of a makeshift umbrella to shield him from the sudden shower of rain. The soles of his leather shoes kept time on the pavement as he made his way towards the corner store, checking his watch out of habit rather than actual time keeping, (His watch at stopped at his time of death and hadn’t begun ticking since. That was the way all time pieces worked here, though; just as lifeless as anything else.) and his russet orbs squinted through the downpour as a faint light flickered in the distant shop window. He would have made it there too, would have purchased the candles he had needed to replace the ones that were nearly out of wick in his apartment and returned home for his usual afternoon cleaning, but Arthur found his steady strut interrupted and his plans for the day interrupted when he tripped over a certain something that had been laid across the sidewalk.
Arthur thought to himself through a sigh as he collected his soggy paper and the arm he had lost in the fall. He shoved it firmly back into its socket with a satisfactory snap while he looked to the source of his blockade and was hardly surprised to find a body. It wasn’t as though they were in particularly short supply around this place.
“Apologies.” Arthur mumbled, righting himself and trying his best to ignore the fact that his ass was now fantastically damp. He reached out his good arm and extended a hand to the stranger, uncurling his long pallid fingers and offering a bit of help to the other man.
“Something not working? My neighbor was having a hell of time with a knee joint a couple weeks back. Ended up fixing it with scraps of metal. Hinges, if you’ll believe it.” His voice was a bit lacking in enthusiasm, dark circles smudged beneath dark eyes, though that was simply the accent of the region; lifeless.
