Anna's Death: A Short Story

There was an hour or so of daylight left before sundown, but Anna still wanted to kill most of it before we hit the road again on our way to wherever the rave—gathering—was happening this time. I was more than content spending that time just talking by the side of Bluegrass Creek with her, but all this reminiscing of what our lives were like before we died had given her a pretty wild idea. Anna, having known that I was removed—confiscated—from the county hospital’s morgue by members of U.A.C.T., and I soon found ourselves at my family’s cemetery in Cresco. Maple Hill Cemetery. “Where do you think they put you?” Anna asked me with the giddiness of a child as she went on a treasure hunt. “I have no idea,” I had countered her question.

There had been a funeral arranged for me even though there was no body yet to bury. Flowers, friends dressed in black, a church service, the whole works as they say, had been done up for me. My family mourned over the loss of their son, brother, nephew, and grandson. People said prayers, friends reminisced and toasted in my name, girls I had briefly dated carried on as if my death was a bigger deal to them than it actually was. It had been over a month before Agent Swan brought my family into the loop that I was technically, not dead, and even then, that was only after she was certain that I wasn’t going to be what they like to call, “a flight risk.” It was during that time of me being dead to the world, with the exception of members of U.A.C.T., that my family and friends had said their goodbyes for a second time to what they thought was me. But, really, while I was wherever the Feds had taken me during that time, at one of their facilities learning how to play ball and be submissive, my family had been fed a line of crap about how I may have contracted something weird, viral, and a possibly contagious disease. That the C.D.C. or some other exotic sickness prevention agency had needed to remove me from the county morgue the night I was taken from the hospital in order to do a full disease protected autopsy in order to determine my cause of