Jen MacLellan has hit a dead end Jen knows tattooed, blue-haired Jack Norris is trouble the minute he opens his front door. And being a mortician in the avante garde East Side of Providence, Jen has seen a lot. Jack has recruited Jen's teenage brother Drew to play drums for his less-than-respectable punk band, and Jen has no choice but to follow their gigs to keep her little brother out of trouble. But when Drew goes missing, she finds herself in the awkward position of asking for Jack's help.
Shocked that he agrees, Jen decides she may have misjudged him. Worse, she might even like him. But when Jen is brutally attacked, she awakens in the hospital where a Sid Vicious look-alike greets her with the news: she's dead, and he's the reaper assigned to take her away. Yeah, not so much. Refusing to leave, Jen's spirit watches helplessly as her loved ones suffer, powerless to ease her family's grief or prevent the police from accusing Jack of her murder.
Desperate to help them, Jen convinces the reaper to bring her back. But reanimating corpses isn't as easy as it looks, and neither is finding a killer before it's too late After being abducted when she was ten and abused for five years by her kidnapper, Ray, Alice's only hope of freedom is in death, but her only way to achieve such an escape is to help Ray find the next girl for his collection. Saffron loved the little Minnesota town where she lived with her older brother Shane.
Whatever happened to his marriage, to his two-year-old daughter, is too traumatic to remember, so his subconscious has chosen to block out key details. Preview wanted dead or alive is available in 1 pages and compose for intermediate difficulty. Preview when i am dead my dearest is available in 1 pages and compose for intermediate difficulty. Preview dead mans party is available in 4 pages and compose for intermediate difficulty. Preview when i m dead and gone a and g chords is available in 4 pages and compose for beginning difficulty.
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There is still some flesh left, white around the tiny core. I am too nervous to imagine eating it. Also, for once, I am not hungry. I have not brushed my teeth. I will smell like food. And Ray will smell it on me. I look at the knife on the kitchen counter and picture it in my chest. He looks at me. Look right at him. Does he know about the food? He looks at it, and then throws it in the trash.
He opens the refrigerator. It is the loudest thing in our apartment, makes odd wheezing noises, like it is struggling to stay cold. Helen and Glenn both have new jobs. Did you know that? Do you want to know where they work? I open my yogurt. My breath will smell okay now. Opens his pants. Give me a kiss hello. He frowns and I hunch over so I barely come up to his shoulder. Then he shoves me to my knees. He drinks beer and orders a pizza and puts me on his lap during the sitcom he hates.
I am hungry again now, think of food; hot dogs, candy bars, the pizza crusts inside the box on the floor. Ray likes how smooth I am, how raw my skin is. My sheets have pictures of cartoon princesses on them, with pink trim and a matching pink comforter. I am so hungry my head hurts with it, making me slow, and he pinches my thigh, hard. He whistles while he shaves, and I listen for the clanking hum of the refrigerator, count out its wheezing rhythm. Ray tried to teach me how to whistle once, in one of his better moods, but I could never pick it up.
He said he still loved me anyway. Lucky me. He keeps it up until he starts to sweat, little beads of moisture gathering at his temples, and then gets up. Every Sunday we go to Freedom Church. Ray believes in God, and in looking at all the little girls in their Sunday best, ribbons and bows and tiny socks with lace on them. The day I got too tall to wear the white dress with short, puffy sleeves and little tucks along the chest, he filled the kitchen sink with water and shoved my head into it.
No one missed me. Remember that. I tell him to have a good day before he leaves my room, and he turns back to grin, proud. He looks like Ray. There are no words for what he looks like to me. He whistles again as he leaves. I close my eyes. There are several women at Freedom Church who think Ray is attractive, with his full head of hair and carefully pressed clothes. They like that he is so strict with me, they say when they talk to him, his hand resting on my shoulder remember what I will do if you ever try to leave me, remember who you belong to.
Their eyes gleam with hope. They want to be taken care of, and they think Ray could do that for them. He laughs at them on the way home, laughs at how old and sad they are. I am 15 now, and I keep waiting for Ray to tire of me. I am no longer short with dimpled knees and frightened eyes. He likes the picture. I am 15 and stretched out, no more than pounds. I can never weigh more than that. It keeps my breasts tiny, my hips narrow, my thighs the size Ray likes.
I am 15 and worn out, tired of everything. I am 15, and I figure soon he will let me go. Ray let her go when she turned He drove her all the way back to where she used to live, to where she was when she was another girl, back to her before.
Her body was found in a river, floating downstream just a mile from the house she grew up in. All you have to do is be good. Be my little girl forever. I could run, but he would find me. He would take me back to Daisy Lane and make everyone who lives there pay. I belong to him. All I have to do is be good. Morning television is boring, all bad news and infomercials, but at nine the talk shows start.
I lie on the sofa and look at the ceiling. There are always shower scenes in them, shots of the women scrubbing their abuse or grief away.
Ray makes me shower once a week, and I hate coming out of the bathroom. The thing is, you can get used to anything. You just are.
My head itches, and I scratch it until the undersides of my fingernails are bright red. I flick the blood and dead bits of my head onto the floor, and get up to take my pills. The one for pimples dries out my skin, and makes the sun blotch me angry red. The one to prevent my period does just that, and although the ads on TV say it just makes your period less painful, I never get mine. I only got my period once, late last year, and Ray got so angry he took out a knife and made me sit on a chair in the corner of the living room.
He looked at me for a long, long time, and then tied me to the chair and left me there until the bleeding stopped. Food and water once a day, a trip to the bathroom each morning and night. One time, I stood up and blood dripped down my leg and onto the carpet and he threw up. And then he rubbed my face in it. When the bleeding stopped he made me scrub myself, the chair, the carpet all around it, and then he threw the chair out and gave me the pills. He keeps the newspaper clippings from when the police found her body, from the funeral and afterward.
Sometimes when he reads them he touches the picture of her in the article, black and white photo of a little lost girl, and cries. Head on my lap, breath hot on my thighs.
I say yes for her. I say yes and used to figure out how many days until I was fifteen while he hunched over me. The audience is always so excited, so happy with all the misery. Sometimes the shows will have on older women with lost eyes and round faces who cry about being abused when they were younger.
The women usually crumple, shed their flesh shells, and become quivering living dead girls, trapped. You should have fought back. You should have known no one has that kind of power. You should have been strong. The women nod and sniffle. They are still broken. They still agree with everything anyone wants. Even the ones who try to explain end up with their heads down, their hands in their laps.
All our fault, always. They have power too. I look out the window at the empty parking lot. Everyone who lives in Shady Pines Apartments works. Everyone has a busy job, long days, and comes home tired. The third was a woman. She was old, bent and wrinkly, and walked with a cane.
She said I should be in school and asked what I was studying when I said my father taught me at home. She sometimes pooped herself and had a daughter, worried-looking and angry, come and take her away three months after she moved in.
The old woman told Ray he was an abomination as she left, but then she also said that to the mailman and the three little boys playing on the sidewalk. Her apartment was rented by the Indian family, a man, a woman, and four little girls.
I thought Ray might like the girls but he said they were ugly dark and had bad teeth. I see them in the hall sometimes, and they never look at me. They know I am wrong, and stay away. Craig was with Emily before, but now he loves Henna and I think next he will love Susan. I love soap operas. I would never have to eat or even be hungry. I would always be listened to. I rub his back and feet while he watches the judge shows that come on before the news.
Anyone can tell that guy is lying. Classic sign. They had no idea how much she loved me. Hands on my throat. So selfish. You know what she used to do to me when I did it? He lets go a little so I can nod. Because he knows I will. I am not strong; I cannot stop him or even slow him down. I can only wait until he gets so tired of me that he lets me die and moves on. How we are all sin. Held him down, rubbed him raw, broke him open.
I let Ray have his nightmares, watch him thrash and listen to his voice squeak with fear. I lie there and watch him and wish he was trapped back there, with her, and had never broken free. But his mother died when he was eighteen, burned to death because she fell asleep smoking a cigarette. Ray got an insurance check from the church school where she worked as a secretary and moved away. He met the first Alice a year later.
His mother never smoked. She seemed the type to do that. Ray stares at little girls and I stare at the food , and feel my heart cramp. It will be over soon, finally, but the thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating.
A family. Let me watch out for a little girl of our own? Let me take care of her? Help me teach her everything she needs to know? He shivers into me, grinning sharper. You screamed. And now look at you. Happy as can be. He is not letting me go. He wants me to stay.
He wants me to find a girl for him. For us. I will find him one, a beautiful little stupid girl, as dumb as the one at Daisy Lane used to be, and show her to him. He will want her, with her little limbs and happy face and solid, live flesh. She will become the new Alice, and he will want her so much he will forget all about me. Kill me to teach her a lesson, probably, and then move on. Yes, that is what will happen. What must happen. You want to teach our girl everything I like.
This new me. Ray has given me bus fare and told me the name of a park he wants me to go see. It is close to the apartment but not too close, a short ride in his truck but a long ride on the bus, and he tells me to remember everything I see.
I get to the park after sitting on two buses, and blink at all the people there. So many of them, and all so young.
I will never remember everything but find a bench that has bags and backpacks tossed in a stack near it anyway, watch kids run over and pull out snacks and drinks, trailing crumbs everywhere. I try to focus, but the world is dizzy, spinning as I think of what I will find here.
The new me. She has to be just right. She has to make him forget everything. Or at least me. I take a breath, to slow the world down, and look. I look and see a girl there. And there. And over there. I grab a notebook, pick up a pencil. The first girl is blond and a little chubby, a thumb sucker. Ray would like teaching her not to do that. I carefully write down blonde and thumb.
She has a babysitter or mother, though, a woman who brings her a foil-wrapped package that the girl bats away, annoyed. But still. They would scream and kick, I can tell. Ray would like that too. I write scream and kick, 2, and then sit with my face turned toward the sun. Tracing over the big frog sticker. My dad gave it to me for my birthday. I lean over and pick up half the pencil from under the bench.
I write ALICE in large letters on the page, then tear it out and leave the notebook on the bench, half the broken pencil beside it. I have found the new me. I think about her all the way home, how she will cry and scream and plead just like I did. It makes me smile. Everyone on the bus who sees me smile looks away. But no one says anything. No one will see you. No one will say anything.
No one will save you. I know what the once upon a time stories say, but they lie. Look at that, four life lessons. Now you owe me. Later, he lets me eat the burned bit of his TV dinner meatloaf while he watches two doctors argue over how to treat a dying boy. I imagine her melting, real light coming out of her, flame bright. That would be a real fairy godmother thing to do. That was how he dressed me for years, until the dresses strained open across my hips and chest, until my arms came out strangled red from the binding sleeves.
Being greedy is bad. Like you tonight, eating that meat. And even if he decorated my neck with a ring of fingerprints and left me lying in the street, no one would notice. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website.
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