babylon mercier /5

"And sometimes, you know, I'm about 99% certain that it was somehow my fault."

My words fall on dead ears, they do that a lot. That's kinda what you sign up for though when most of your friends are deceased. Not that I guess I'd call them friends, they're more like acquaintances or one-off therapy sessions that they never signed up for. It's not like they can get out of it, can't do much of anything anymore being dead and all.

Maybe I work too much.

My needle hooks under dead skin and back through again, I'm just about done with him, poor thing. He's a bit of a celebrity around here, John Doe was brought to the Mercier clinic after they finally took him down from where he was nailed to Gingham Electric's wall. I couldn't care less though, he's just another body in my daily quota and when I'm finished here, we'll wait for someone to claim him and if they don't, into the furnace he goes.

"Anyway, it's been weird since then, dad gets me on weekends but I don't want to stay with him, he's on my uncle's couch still? Weird right?"

Maybe that isn't all that weird but it has been almost a year since my mom finally gave him the boot. Something about how she didn't like the way that he tried to discipline me, how spankings aren't good for a kid, yadda yadda, whatever. I think it was something else like it had to be. Otherwise, that just means people fall out of love and that doesn't really add up.

When you love someone, you're supposed to love them forever, no matter what right? At least that's what Grandma says and she's still with Papa. Pretty sure they had their fourty-fifth anniversary a couple of years ago.

I don't want to believe that people can fall out of love, I mean true love, because that means one day someone will fall out of love with me.

That just fucks me up, you know?

My mom met my dad and they were in love, they got married, they had me and were together for fifteen years and then one day my mom just decided it was over.

That she didn't love him.

"God, I hope no one loved you," I tell the corpse, "They probably have no idea you're dead yet, damn what a blow."

I never want to fall in love with someone that could leave me. So I guess that means I'll just never love anyone, at least not like that. I have people, mom and dad, the rest of my family and my friends.

Okay, so I haven't got many friends, at least not live ones. My best friend left a week or so ago too, you've probably heard of her. Crazy bitch was drunk when she volunteered, I'm sure of it, at the least severely hungover, we'd partied the night before. I'd brought her a bottle of red I'd taken from the wine cellar. Wine had always been my dad's thing and he'd never come to get his collection. Mom only drinks sometimes so I decided it was mine.

What's mine is hers, so we drank the whole bottle and I asked her if she was nervous for the reaping but I don't remember what she said to me. Even when I try hard to think about it, all I see is her draped over my bed, hair falling onto the floor and her lips moving. Did she tell me then that she planned to volunteer?

I don't know.

And I can't stop dreaming.

I've had the same one every night this week. I'm in the prep room, getting my apron and scrubs on. I tie my mask carefully, wash my hands and step across the white tile of the mortuary to the coolers. Something feels off, that's how I know it's the dream again. There's a prickling on the back of my neck, I can't change my course no matter how hard I try. Then my hand is reaching out and unlocking a cooler. It all feels so real, I even feel the cold.

Then I pull the drawer open and there's my best friend, Lysander Mae, eyes shut and a ribbon of red around her neck.

That's always when I wake up.

I can't live in that moment, in that worry, wondering if I'll actually have to attend a funeral for someone I know for once. I don't want to prepare my best friend's body for death, to paint her eyelids in the exact shade I know she liked because I gave her the colour last Christmas.

And that's the trouble with loving someone who can leave you, in the end, they always will because maybe you were never someone worth staying with.

I don't know how to become that.