Elaine awoke lying on a cold metal slab, her eyes stinging from the brightness of the fluorescent lights overhead, the chill in the room raising goosebumps along her naked flesh. From the cold temperature and the sterile smell in the air, she knew immediately that she was in a morgue. There was a man standing over her with an expressionless face stretched thin over sharp bones. The man blinked his owlish eyes at her. “I was beginning to think you would never wake up,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Elaine sat up slowly. Her voice was hoarse with disuse and her tongue felt like sandpaper, gritty where it rubbed against her teeth. “I mean—aren’t I—?”

“Dead?” the man, a mortician, supplied. “Yes, you are. But…” He gestured to the wall. Above a silver counter laden with torturous-looking instruments, words flashed continuously across a dark screen:

ALL CITIZENS ARE ENTITLED TO ONE RESURRECTION, COURTESY OF YOUR GOVERNMENT.

“Oh,” was all Elaine said. That explained what she was doing here, then—how the last thing she could remember was walking out into the street, focused more on the voice yammering in her ear than the traffic, the sound of shouting coming from the sidewalk and the loud blaring of a horn, bright headlights emerging from the smog at a speed much too high for an inner-city road. How there was a large blank gap in her memory between seeing those lights and waking up on this slab. It made so much sense, now. Elaine was dead. Or rather, she had been. Truthfully, she had never felt better in her life than she did at this moment, sitting on the mortician’s table naked as the day her tube was opened, and she was delivered into the patient arms of her parents.

“I feel great,” she told the mortician reassuringly, in case the man had any doubts as to his own skill. “You really did a fine job.”

The mortician did preen a little bit. “Well, I took the liberty of fixing a few things while you were—incapacitated.”

“I can tell.” Elaine flexed her arms. Her shoulder no longer popped every time she rotated it. She tapped her bad ankle against the side of the table and felt no shooting pain up her leg. The perpetual ache in her back had disappeared, and she was certain that, were she to look in a mirror, the dusting of gray in her dark hair would be gone without a trace. The best part, however, was the complete lack of scars or external damage—nothing to suggest that Elaine had, in fact, been run down by a speeding vehicle just hours before.

The mortician gathered Elaine’s clothes and turned his back while she redressed. He then gave Elaine some pamphlets that had ridiculous titles like Your New Life and You! and How to Avoid Unnecessary Death.

“Now, I’m required by law to stress how important it is to be cautious with your new life,” the mortician said as he escorted Elaine up the stairs, to a well-decorated lobby that looked more like the lobby of a nice hotel than a morgue. “Resurrections are an extensive and costly process, and it would be most shameful of you to waste this opportunity. Who knows how many years you can get out of this new life if you give it the proper care.”

Elaine thanked the man with a firm handshake and a promise to take good care of her new life. Why wouldn’t she? Being alive had never felt like this the first time around. She felt energized. She felt—invincible.

She hailed a cab across town. She was amazed that she still remembered things such as the exact location of her apartment. She had always assumed death would be disorienting, with dark patches of missing memories and a feeling of detachment from the world. But Elaine did not feel that way at all. She was happy; giddy, even. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ever felt giddy.

The elevator in her building took too long, and so in an unprecedented move Elaine decided to take the stairs up. No one ever used stairs anymore, and it was a testament to just how old this building was that it even still had them, but Elaine jogged her way up to the fifth floor with a bounce in her step. Reaching the door with the familiar number flickering on its view-panel, Elaine fished the key fob out of her jacket pocket.

“Honey!” she called as the door slid open and she stepped into the darkened apartment. “Lucy? It’s me, it’s Elaine.”

The panel to the bedroom slid open and light flooded the room. Lucy appeared in her nightgown, blonde hair spilling down, and the light shining through it made it seem like she was wearing a halo. Elaine had never been so happy to see her.

“Elaine?” Lucy’s voice sounded groggy, like Elaine had woken her. She was a bit disappointed Lucy had not been up mourning her, but Lucy never had been the type for extravagant displays of emotion. Perhaps she had cried herself to sleep. She squinted at Elaine, as though the shadows were playing tricks on her. “Lights on,” she said, cringing as the overheads powered on, but her eyes went wide when she saw Elaine. “It is you!”

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Elaine exclaimed. “Those morticians really know what they’re doing.”

“They certainly do,” Lucy said as Elaine enveloped her in a hug.

“Lucy, I feel like a new woman,” Elaine said. Lucy pulled back to study her.

“You look like a new one,” she agreed. “You’re so young—like when I first met you. Why did they make you so young?”

Elaine shrugged. “The mortician said he fixed a few things. I wasn’t about to question a free resurrection, Luce.”

As she spoke, she gave Lucy a quick once-over. With her new, younger eyes, she noticed things about Lucy that she had failed to notice before she died. There were tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her hair, though still golden in color, had thinned considerably from the tresses she used to run her fingers through. She was frail, too—almost skeletal. Lucy was no longer young.

“Look at you,” Lucy said softly. Her fingers flitted across Elaine’s face like ghosts, whisper-soft, outlining the planes of her cheekbones and the cut of her jaw. Her skin was smooth and unblemished and if she had only been paying a bit more attention she would have noticed the way in which Lucy curled her fingernails into her shoulders was not born of happiness but jealousy. But she did not notice, too caught up in the way her new body responded to Lucy, quicker than in her old life, and she scooped Lucy up into her arms and carried her into the bedroom, the panel swishing shut softly behind them.

 

 

Elaine and Lucy went out to parties and all their friends cooed over Elaine’s new body, so familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time, and made thinly-veiled comments about how much Lucy must be enjoying her wife’s newfound youth and stamina. Lucy’s eyes would crinkle, and she would blush, and Elaine would hide a smile behind her champagne flute.

Women young enough to be her daughters—though her new body hardly looked thirty—flocked to her when she attended social events. They would touch her arm and bat their eyelashes at her, and she would laugh and flirt but nothing ever came of it, because though she looked younger she was still a middle-aged woman and she knew better. There was Lucy to think about.

At one such party there was a woman named Aster, and Aster was very young and very beautiful. She had dark hair and pouty lips and when she asked Elaine if she was married she thought, fleetingly, about saying no. She immediately felt guilty for having such a thought and excused herself as politely as she could manage, drifting through the crowd until she found the bar. Then she took her champagne and went out into the garden, hoping the orange glow of the smog-filled sky might calm her mind.

Aster of the dark hair and full lips followed her. “You know, you’re more beautiful than you were before, when you were young,” is what she said, and Elaine was a mix of flattered and insulted.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “have we met before?”

Aster smiled and presented her wrist, palm up. Embossed there in her skin was a resurrection mark, there to let future morticians know that only exorbitant amounts of money would be able to save Aster from the grave a second time. Elaine had a matching mark on the bottom of her foot.

“It becomes easier to recognize yourself in others,” Aster said.

“How old are you?” The question was out before Elaine could stop it.

The corners of Aster’s mouth twitched. “Eighty-four, as of last month,” she said.

Elaine was flabbergasted. “And how many times have you, you know—?”

The look Aster gave her was bemused. “You don’t get it, do you?” She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Elaine’s ear. “This is your body now. They don’t just bring you back. They keep you from going anywhere.”

Elaine did not know what to say. Aster leaned over, pressing her lips to Elaine’s cheek. “See you around,” she whispered, and then she was gone. Elaine’s skin tingled where her lips had touched, and she thought about running after her. She was young and beautiful, and she was in a body twenty years younger than her wife’s, and Aster was also young and beautiful, and she thought Elaine was attractive. She could already see herself in Aster’s bedroom, her dark hair fanned out across white bedsheets, her tanned legs draped over Elaine’s shoulders. But even as she yearned to run after Aster she knew she wouldn’t. There was Lucy to think about. Lucy was her wife, and though Lucy was older now, she was still her wife.

Elaine wandered back into the party. She found the press of people and the constant noise too overwhelming, so she headed upstairs where the crowd thinned and people sat in dark corners smoking cigarettes and discussing the deeper things, things Elaine was yet too sober to contemplate. She perched at the top of the stairs, thinking this was a good vantage point to observe the crowd below. She drank for several moments in peaceful silence before a shadow fell over her and she recognized the scent of Lucy’s perfume.

“I saw you with her,” Lucy said, her words slurred. Had she been that drunk before, or had seeing Elaine and Aster together on the balcony driven her to consume more than she normally would? “I hate you and I wish you had stayed dead.”

“What did I do to you to make you hate me?” Elaine asked, genuinely curious. “I came back to you, didn’t I? I could have gone, but I didn’t. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

Lucy scowled at her, and she noted the redness around her eyes. “You’re young,” she spat. “You’re beautiful, like a painting come to life. People love you and yet they whisper behind our backs. Do you know what they say?” Elaine shook her head. “They mock me for holding you back,” Lucy hissed. “I will never be young and beautiful again, and they wonder what you could possibly want with an old hag like me.”

Elaine looked up at her and for the first time recognized the look in her eyes for what it really was: a horrible envy. Lucy did not hate her because she had been kissed, however briefly and innocently, by Aster. Lucy hated her because she had people fawning over her, and they did not fawn over Lucy. Her presence made Lucy acutely more aware of her own mortality. Natural deaths weren’t usually candidates for resurrection the way violent ones were. As she grew old and wrinkled, her chances of coming back as a better version of herself grew less likely. Elaine did not remember the Lucy she had married being this vain, but perhaps she had been blind to it before. These new eyes, they saw more deeply than the old ones ever had.

“I always try to do what is best for you,” she said. Lucy scoffed.

“If you’d truly had my best interests at heart, you wouldn’t have come back at all.”

Elaine sighed. “I can’t change what I didn’t choose, Luce.”

Elaine had always towered over Lucy, but standing there now, she felt small in the face of her contempt. She did not want to be hated by Lucy. She had loved her, once, had thought that with this new body something in their relationship would be rekindled, but the only thing it had done was cause the rift between them to grow wider.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” she said, and she truly meant it. She put a hand on Lucy’s arm, gripping the twig-like appendage tight. She glanced over the railing to the floor below.

“But I think I have a solution.”

 

 

“You look good, Lucy. Really good. Those morticians sure know what they’re doing, don’t they?”

Lucy practically glowed. Her skin was soft, her teeth white, her eyes less sunken. They had removed the freckles across her nose, the ones Elaine had always secretly loved, and made her hair wavier than it had been. It was still blonde, though a much brighter shade, like sunshine, and her blue eyes were practically electric. She hadn’t been lying. Lucy’s mortician, whoever they were, had done a damn fine job.

“Thank you.” Lucy ducked her head demurely, a soft smile on her lips. Oh, she was dangerous like this. “What about you? How are you coping?”

Elaine shrugged. “Better now that they’re commuting my sentence. You’re technically not dead anymore. No crime, no prison sentence.”

“That’s good—that’s really good news, Elaine.” Lucy reached out—her long, red nails reminding Elaine of talons—like she was going to touch Elaine’s hand, but then hesitated, as though thinking better of it, her hands settling awkwardly on the table in front of her.

They sat in silence for a moment. It wasn’t companionable, but Elaine wasn’t complaining. She figured they had stopped being friends the moment she’d pushed Lucy over that balcony, although she’d done it for Lucy. She was only giving Lucy what she wanted most—the chance to be young again.

“Elaine, I want a divorce,” Lucy finally said, and Elaine nodded.

“I assumed as much.”

“It’s just that I don’t need you anymore. I mean, look at me.” She did look. Lucy’s red outfit was flashy and distracting and not at all like the Lucy she’d once known. Perhaps it was better this way. Elaine was not so sure she wanted to be married to the new Lucy. She was not so sure she liked the new Lucy at all. Death changed a person, she knew. Coming back changed them even more. What parts of Lucy had she left behind in the grave? What parts had come back with her? Elaine wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Lucy stood, moving like she was going to give Elaine a hug, but a nearby guard cleared his throat and reminded her, sounding embarrassed, that she was not allowed to touch. Elaine tried not to let her relief show on her face. The thought of being touched by this new Lucy was almost unbearable.

“Well.” Lucy seemed momentarily lost, but then she brightened, and gave Elaine a smile. “Goodbye, Elaine,” she said.

She turned to leave, and the last Elaine saw of her was the resurrection mark on the back of her neck.

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Featured image by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash.

 

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