“‘In the event of my death, burn my corpse immediately. DO NOT WAIT.’”
“What d'ye ‘spose it means, then?”
“Well I think it's obvious what it means, aye?”
“Ach, aye, but I think it warrants the question! Not a common request, I should say…What’s this, then? …by Christ, looks like old Joe had the thing notarized!”
“...Ooohh, aye, so he has.”
“...It's a bit strange, don’t ya think? Carryin’ around a note for the unlikely ‘appenin’ of ‘is death. Seems suspect to me.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Colm. I’m sure it's just somethin’ like one of those medical alert bracelet things like what tells a medic he gets seizures and whatnot.”
“But he never got seizures, Bill.”
“Yes, I know that, Colm, but I just mean if he had seizures, he’d be like’ to keep a note about him to that effect.”
“Ah, fair play, Bill, fair play…. But I put it to ye again: what’s our Joe doin’, god rest him, with a note talkin’ about burnin’ his body for?”
“Aye, Colm, the question is indeed puzzlin’. But I think we might be best to just get along with it.”
“Oh? Will we, yea? Can we really do that to our friend who we just had supper with not ten hours ago? Christ, but I don’t partic’larly want to go smellin’ it again…twice cooked fish from ‘me own friend’s stomach! The thought of it is makin’ me sick. Surely he can’t really have meant it. Prob’ly did it fer a laugh, like.”
“No, Colm, I’m not so sure. I can tell this here was no laughin’ matter. Think about it: if he went to the trouble to take it to the notary, and I happen to know that the only Notary Public closer than Dublin is Mary O’Shea, who our Joe has hated since they were wains, he had to mean it. I don’t know much, but I know Joe wouldn’t have gone knockin’ at Mary O’Shea’s door without a damned good reason. And besides that, it clearly states: ‘do not wait.’ I think by that measure, we've already waited too long.”
“Aye, I’d not thought of that…. I suppose you’re right, Bill. Sure look, then.”
“Two shorten the road.”
The two men sighed, hefted their recently departed friend from his bunk in the shared cabin, minding not to jostle him too much lest they disrespect the dead, and began to carry him out onto the moor where they could be clear of the tinderbox hut.
It had been a fine enough holiday. Bill, Colm, and Joe had set out from their village two days prior, and were having a grand time surveying the land, sightseeing in the brisk autumn breeze. They’d eaten sandwiches, and Bill had spent enough time yesterday evening at the riverbank for them to have a perfectly acceptable supper of campfire perch before retiring to the scant beds of the overnight, blissfully exhausted and content.
But when Bill and Colm woke the following morning, they found that their friend Joe had barely stirred since they’d taken up for the night, and in fact seemed rather still. Sensing something amiss, they tried to rouse him with the smell of freshly-brewed coffee, as they suspected he'd had a chilly sleep and would welcome a hot cup to warm his bones. When the smell did nothing to move him, the two began to grow worried and took to calling softly to him from the overnight door, wondering aloud whether to poke him with a stick or to thrash him out of bed as his mother might.
When Joe still did not move and the light of the sun was finally beginning to crest the distant cliffs, Colm had had enough.
“Alright Joe, come on with it. Ye can't just laze about in bed all day. We've still got road ahead!” and he smacked Joe heartily on the shoulder, smiling kindly at his supposedly sleeping friend.
But the resounding echo that responded from Joe’s frozen sternum was a less comforting reply than he had hoped for.
“Christ! Did ye hear that, Bill?”
“Aye, I heard it, Colm! What d'ye ‘spose it was?”
“Well Bill, I don't mean to alarm you, but I do believe that was our Joe here.”
“Say it ain't so!”
“He's like a block of ice, so he is! And look here, his eyes are open! Christ, you'd think we'd've noticed that….”
“Colm! You don't mean–”
“Aye, Bill. Looks like old Joe's gone to meet his maker....You don't suppose he was sick, do ye? He seemed…well, he seemed grand, didn't he? He didn't seem out of sorts or nothin’.”
“No, I can't say as he did. Jesus, Mary and Joseph… Colm, this is terrible! It’s a right tragedy, it is! Just look at ‘im! Our dear friend, cut down so young. Lord, but if he didn’t just reach his prime!”
“Bill, he was sixty-three years old. I don’t think he’d been in his prime for quite a while now. And I think yer missin’ the bigger picture here: our dear friend hasn't just died. He's gone hollow!” and Colm rapped once swiftly on Joe's shoulder, the tinny gong punctuating his statement rather pointedly.
“What about that, then?”
But Bill could not be challenged.
“Well…he can't have just…emptied overnight! Sure he must’ve always been that way.”
“Always been that way? How can somebody be hollow their whole lives with no one noticin’?”
“Christ if I know, Colm, but he bloody sure is now! Tell me this: if he weren’t hollow before now, where did all of his innin’s go? Got up and walked away, I suppose? ‘Oh, thanks very much, but I think I’ll be off now! Come on, Liver, out we go!’”
“Alright, Bill, alright! Fine. So let’s suppose he was ‘already hollow’. Why was he hollow?”
“Well…I don’t know if it’s right fer us to ‘round asking questions about another man’s body like that. He deserves some privacy, at the very least. A little dignity in death.”
Colm was flummoxed, and stared, mouth agape, at Bill, but could think of no way to argue. He finally raised the cap on his head to run a free hand across his thinning hair in frustration, and replied with a sigh,
“.... Ach! Aye, I s’pose you’re right. It's a cow's ear whichever way ye’ cut it. I’ll not ask again about his organs, though I am concerned about their whereabouts…. Do you think we should call someone?”
“Who, then? Joe’s got no one left, what with his Aisling dyin’ last summer. Don’t ye remember? We came out to raise his spirits; it was their anniversary next month.”
“Well we have to call someone. The paramedics, maybe?”
“It’ll take them all bloody day, but they’re yer men fer it, I s’pose…unless ya think a mortician would do better.”
“I think they’d both be arseways about the current state of ‘im.”
“...you don’t s’pose it could be a fake, do ye?”
“A fake?”
“Yeah, like one of those crash test dummies or somethin’.”
“Why would anyone go to the trouble of makin’ a perfect copy of our Joe? It’s the spittin’ image!”
“Well…maybe it’s a joke; maybe old Joe’s just acting the maggot.”
Bill didn’t wait for a reply before he tossed to one side the woolen blanket that had Joe covered up to the chest, revealing the slab of him looking rather shocked in his Long Johns, their sleeves pulled down over his hands, the legs stretched to cover his feet, his eyes open wide.
“Alright, then, Joe! We know what yer up to. Come on out!”
“Is that somethin’ stickin’ out of his shirt, there?” Colm was pointing to the buttons at Joe’s neck, where the corner of something was poking out from the grey hairs on his chest. Bill reluctantly unbuttoned the last two buttons of Joe’s collar as gently as he could and carefully removed the thick paper that had been placed inside his shirt. In as legal a garb as he could ever have dreamed to see them, the words commanded:
‘In the event of my death, burn my corpse immediately. DO NOT WAIT.’
“Well, Bill? What's it say?”
When the two men had carried their hollow friend far enough away from the hut, they laid him down on the cool grass and placed their hands on their hips.
“So…do we burn him now?”
“Aye, I think we gotta.”
They began to scavenge for dry twigs and branches, loose stones they could use to build their friend a pyre. It was a peaceful morning, so the work was not a strain to them. They even caught themselves quietly whistling at turns while bundling up armfuls of crackling tinder, but were quick to return to solemn, mournful hums. The breeze shifted the grass about Joe’s empty body gently, and were it not for his open, glassy eyes peering endlessly heavenward, they might have again mistaken him for softly sleeping.
When the pyre had finally been, admittedly crudely, built, they hoisted their friend onto the squat heap and placed his hands crossways over his chest.
“Here, look now…is his skin comin’ off?”
Bill turned back to the hands he’d just laid and saw that his own fingers had left indentations and little tears where they had touched.
“Well now!”
The skin seemed oddly thin. Thinner, they thought, than even the brittlest paper tree bark, a cold gossamer shroud. Upon closer inspection, they could see the rubbery stretch of it against his frame, how strangely it seemed to both cling to and fall from him, like a husk of wet linen.
“Ain’t that the strangest thing ya ever did see. It’s a wonder he ever stayed put together. Looks like he was made o’ balloons!”
“He’s not made o’ balloons, ya eejit. Sure the fella probably just had a skin condition.”
“More like a skin deformity…”
“Ah, don’t be cruel. He’s had a rough night as it is.”
“Hold on now, look’a there – there’s somethin’ shiny in his arm.”
“Oh, and what are you doin’, an autopsy? Leave the man be!”
“Hush now and let me have a look at him!”
Colm reached out to grasp at the glinting thing beneath Joe’s crepe skin and Bill grabbed his hand, indignantly pulling him back, determined that they maintain a modicum of respect for their dead friend. But Colm had already managed to take hold of a hunk of something hard and smooth, and with it a tiny wrinkle of Joe’s flesh-like membrane. Colm protested briefly–
“G’wan then, Bill! I just wanna see–”
Before either could say another word, the whole of Joe’s forearm came off in Colm’s hand with a clunk and a faint, wet tearing like damp cardboard as the flesh ripped halfway up his thin bicep. Bill was no longer chastising him, but instead transfixed with shock and puzzlement at the suddenly very soft-looking segment of iridescent blue clay that Colm was holding abreast, suspended between them as if he was afraid it might spring back to life at any moment. The skin hung loosely from the arm like a latex glove, flapping slightly in the breeze, and Colm clumsily tried to wrap it back around the disembodied blue lump; the spots he'd touched had molded to his skin, and he could see his own faint fingerprints imbedded in its cloudy, shimmering surface. It made him uneasy.
Bill finally snapped back to himself, and resumed his scolding.
“Now what did ye go and do that for? Desecration of a body is a crime.”
“I feel I should point out that we’re here to do exactly that. And anyway, it was an accident.”
Colm cautiously lifted the veil of skin to peer again at the odd blue beneath, and turned it this way and that in the light to watch it shine. “Now did ya ever see a thing like that before? It looks like…like some kind of metal, or plastic or something, but – well feel it. It’s like putty.”
Bill took a step back when Colm extended the arm at him.
“Oh no, Colm. Don’t go pointin’ old Joe’s fingers my way. I’ll not touch that thing, and you shouldn’t, either. It isn’t right! Just put the poor man’s arm back on ‘im.”
“D’ya not want to know what it’s made of? It’s blue, for Christ’s sake!”
“Now listen at you, there! ‘It’ this, ‘it’ that. That’s our Joe you’re talkin’ about! He! All this ‘it’ nonsense, you’d think he was a sack of potatoes!”
“But Bill…you’re not listenin’ to me. He is blue. Blue! Ya ever seen the inside of a human body, Bill? They’re not blue, they’re red. So what’s this?”
“Well he’s dead, Colm. Things go blue when they die.”
Exasperated, Colm threw all three hands in the air and shouted.
“For the love o’ God, Bill! Listen to yerself! Look at the arm!” and began to wave it in Bill’s face, pulling back the skin to expose a flash of waxy azure. “This isn’t the arm of a well man, or a dead man, or a man at all!”
“What are ye sayin’, Colm?”
“Sure ya know yerself! I’m sayin’ that I don’t think our Joe here was…human.”
Bill considered this for a moment, and scratched his head as he pondered the rubbery blue arm in Colm’s hand, the strange mound of Joe’s rigid form on the stark altar beside him.
“...No. No, I’ll not hear a word of it. Joe was our friend, and I’ll not have you besmirching his good name with all this talk about him not bein’ human. Joe was just as much a man as you or me! It’s not his fault his body was a bit…odd. Sure but if I haven’t got a wart on me ankle I’ve had since I turned twenty, and a birthmark what looks like a frog on me back! You sayin’ I’m not human? You sayin’ you’d be like’ ta turn yer back on a man just because ye found out he was a little different?”
Colm sighed deeply and shook his head, letting his (and Joe’s) hands fall to his side. “Bill. I’m not saying that, at all. But look at the man! First, he’s dead. Then, he’s hollow. Now he’s blue and his arms are fallin’ off? It’s just too much, Bill! For one thing, why isn’t his arm hollow, like? If any of him is hollow, why not all of him? What the hell is wrong with his skin? And why on God’s green earth do we have to burn ‘im?! Why–”
“Because it’s what he wanted!”
Bill finally burst over the nagging questions, and Colm could suddenly see Joe’s note crumpling in Bill’s hand as his voice pitched higher and began to waver.
“It’s what our friend wanted! You’re a good man, Colm, but dammit, Joe was a good man, too! If I die, are you gonna pick me apart to find all the awful things lurkin’ underneath? Christ, Colm, he drove your mother to church every day for a month when ye went to visit yer sister in London. He let you sleep on his couch when you and your Darla were fightin’ like Kilkenny cats. He helped old Jennifer Deery's son get a job down at the docks…Ach! It ain't even the point! Maybe you’re right. Maybe he weren’t ‘human.’ But if ‘human’ means tearin’ him limb from limb to get a look-see before he’s shoved off, then maybe I’m not so ‘human’ meself! Alls I know is that my friend Joe was a good man, and he deserves peace.”
Colm slouched away, taken aback by Bill’s emotional plea. He stared a while longer at his silently weeping friend, who would not return his gaze. He had never known Bill to cry.
“Bill…look, I’m sorry. Yer right. Joe was a good man. And a good man deserves good friends who don’t leave stones unturned when they find ‘im unexpectedly dead. So if ye must know, yes, I would go ‘round askin’ all the same questions if it were you ‘stead of Joe. All the same, I didn’t mean to pull his arm off. I am sorry fer that.”
He gingerly placed Joe’s arm back across his chest, careful to lay the ripped flap of skin back over the – now seemingly hardening – blue dermis. He couldn’t help but hesitate to pull away when the glimmer all at once lost its luster, and resumed a plastic-like consistency. Perhaps the arm was hollow, after all... But he could see that Bill would not be able to stand any more prodding, and finally conceded, placing his hands in his pockets and sighing into the wind.
“It’s just all so strange, ain’t it?...one minute, you’re here, and the next you’re…well, hollow, apparently. If you’re anything like Joe.”
Bill sniffed softly and tried to smooth the parchment in his hands, shakily flattening the creases with his palm. After a silent moment, he straightened himself and puffed out his chest, clearing his throat with a start.
“Wind’s doin’ me eyes in.”
As Bill said this, a thunk echoed from somewhere inside Joe’s shell, and the skin around his left eye dried and shriveled like burning tissue paper, drifting off with the wind in wisps; the blue beneath began to crumble, and all at once the whole eye sank into the empty darkness where Joe’s brain should have been, thudding dully against the inside of his fictile blue skull. They leapt into each other’s arms and stared, horrified, at the yawning socket, its jagged crater slowly growing, blue flake by blue flake.
“...I think we should burn ‘im now.”
The two men hastily disentangled and began to fumble through their pockets for a match or a flint, eager to fulfill Joe’s final wish – so long as it meant not having to watch this macabre display any longer.
“Where the bloody hell is the light?!”
“Don’t worry, Bill. I’ve got it.”
Colm quickly checked a few more pockets, then snapped his fingers at the sudden recollection of making the fire for the morning’s coffee, and flipped the cap off his head, withdrawing a book of matches from its lining.
“Not used to pockets without holes anymore,” he explained apologetically.
“Quit stallin’ for time and let the man have his rest, now. Ain’t right to leave him with that hole in his face… ”
Colm nodded solemnly and lit a match, approaching the body with caution. He hesitated:
“...what if somethin’ strange happens?”
“Colm!”
“I’m serious, Bill! What if he explodes or somethin’? Should we run for it, just in case?”
Bill thought for a moment, twisting his lips to the side as he considered the body, and the wind.
“...I don’t think we need to do that. Just toss the match and stand away. It’ll take the sticks a moment to catch, anyway.”
This seemed reasonable enough to Colm, so he flicked the match into a patch of thin, dry kindling just below Joe’s right shoulder and took a generous stride back to stand beside Bill at their friend’s brushwood grave. It caught the grassy tuft quickly, and a tiny plume of translucent white smoke began to meander up along the flayed arm. Suddenly, just as the smallest snake-tongue of flame began to lick at Joe’s detached and exposed blue elbow, the whole arm became engulfed – and then his chest, his head, and his legs – until, within moments, his entire body was alight, raging and pulsing beneath the panicked, dancing heat. His skin became waxen and bubbly, dripping thick, sarcoline bulbs into the tangle of shrubs beneath him and revealing once more the bizarre reflective blue of his inner shell.
Colm took a few startled steps back, dragging Bill along with him, and they both gasped at the immediacy of such an inferno. Neither was able to look away from the sputtering soup of liquefying flesh as it streamed off in milky tendrils, boiling away to nothing against the otherworldly lapis. The silent body lay there, wrapped in the familiar, hungry roar of bonfire, and appeared to mirror an unseen ocean, rippling and churning in unbelievable shades of turquoise and seafoam.
The screeching began without warning.
As if the fields were filled with hissing beetles and whistling fireworks, the air was all at once cut with a mechanical, high-pitched shriek, a rhythmic claxon that rang out across the moor like an alarm. The body was screaming, but not from any mouth; they could see through the flame, which burned a violent yellow-green, that Joe’s face was continuing to crumble, the lips and cheeks all but decimated, and his chest had begun to open up to the raging fire. His scratching wail spat anew into the air, growing louder with every fresh trench the flame dug into his disintegrating form. The cavern in his sternum grew to the size of a dinner plate, and Colm clapped his hands over his ears, wincing against the piercing screech which became as loud as gunfire as the whole of Joe’s abdomen burned away.
Bill, too, placed his hands to his ears and stared, dumbfounded, at the flaming corpse. Colm began to shout over the echoing siren:
“What the bloody hell is this?! Has he got a feckin’ bank inside ‘im?! Where’s all this racket comin’ from?”
“What?!”
Bill wasn’t looking at Colm. He was staring up into the sky above the screaming pyre, and when Colm followed his gaze, he saw the clear blue day, the clouds, a slight shimmer from the heat of the fire. But no smoke.
The blaring alarm emanating from within Joe’s body slowly began to die down to a drumming hiss as the empty mounds of his shoulders and hips crumpled into a heap of blue shards and ash, which rained down now and then onto the slowly drying wax of his melted skin, leaving trails of glittery cobalt behind like rivers spouting from the flames. When his head finally caved in and the remaining lumps of his mannequin legs were reduced to a pile, the neon flames withered, extinguishing within moments of his total collapse, and silence finally resumed. The two men were left there, staring at the dust of him, not saying a word.
After a few minutes had passed, Colm realized the kindling beneath Joe had barely smoldered, and did not continue to burn when his body had been spent. He knelt beside the pyre and ran a cautious hand along the untouched tinder, shaking his furrowed brow.
“What d’ya make o’ that, Bill? The wood’s barely warm.”
Bill shrugged.
“Bad wood,” he replied blankly.
Colm stood once more, and leaned in to peer at the blue veins left woven down the sides of the kindling pile, now all hardened in the cool breeze. Just as he was reaching to run a hand through Joe’s glinting, metallic ashes, a gust of wind rose up from behind them and wafted Joe’s silt body into the air, carrying him off across the moor like some specter of stardust.
“Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis,” Bill incanted mournfully.
Colm frowned into his empty hand and watched the blue haze swirling like drunken magpies away from them for a frustrated moment before offering a reluctant “amen.” They gazed out into the countryside until they could no longer see the floating shimmer of Joe’s final form drifting in the sun. The day was bright and windy, and the faint smell of smoke had dissipated shortly after the flames began to eat away at Joe’s body. There was nothing left now but the empty, sapphire-streaked bier to indicate that they had even passed through this way. Colm shook his head and let out another sigh, shoving his hands into his pockets and turning to Bill, who had barely moved.
“Fancy a pint, then? I’m cream crackered.”
Bill seemed lost in thought.
“Bill?”
“Hm? Ah, aye. We’ll have a toast to Joe.”
The two turned back toward the wooden shack and eventually meandered out onto the road, strolling in silence as the wind rushed through the brambles and shook the tall barley. The road grew rocky as they withdrew further and further away from the rolling hillside, and Colm took care to avoid the small puddles of mud that became more frequent as they trekked.
“Gobshite!”
Bill tumbled forward as his boot slid across a wet patch, his arms braced in front of him as he pitched to the ground.
“Stupid feckin’ rocks!”
“Are ye alright, Bill?”
Colm extended an arm to help his friend up, but Bill ignored it and heaved himself up onto his knees, his shirt and trousers now soiled with dirt. He brushed off his front and stood up, giving himself another quick dust-down and wiping his hands on the lapel of his coat.
“Are your hands hurt?” Colm asked, concerned. Bill looked down and briefly examined his palms before placing them back into his pockets.
“Ach, I’ll be alright. Just a little scratch. Not the worst that could happen, I should say,” he said, grinning a little.
Colm smiled, and shook his head.
“Aye, I can’t argue wit’ ya there.”
So they continued down the road to have a drink in memory of their dearly departed friend. After a ways, Bill slowed down a little, and pulled his hand out of his pocket to stare at the slash of thin, open flesh on his left palm, the shimmering, milky blue beneath.
“Come on, Bill, catch up!”
Bill shoved his hand back into his pocket and jogged the few feet between them.
“...now's there's only two, this road's a little longer than I recall,” Bill said, shaking Colm's shoulder with his free right hand. They both laughed, and away they went, alone together, up the long and winding path home.
