Afterlife

There was a graveyard of lifeless cars at the bottom of the lake.

Lifeless, in an ironic way— in the way that you see a car as alive when it’s running, because it has a function, even though it’s cold metal all the way through. These ‘dead’ cars, lying full of water in the depths of the lake, were crawling with algae, weeds, and little fish flitting out between the cracks in their windshields. They were pulsing with life. And yet, by the account of any person you asked, they were dead.

“It’s kind of funny,” Maya said to her brother as they were walking the trail along the lake, stepping through dappled shadows underneath the waterside trees. A hundred thousand footprints had made up this path in the past: a mosaic of shoe-soles, where people had made their imprint unconsciously. She kicked at a pebble with the tip of her sneaker, but only managed to ram it further into the moist earth, making an impression in it. Wryly, she thought: there was her contribution to the mosaic.

“It’s not that funny,” Dante said. Green spring light filtered over his form, slouched slightly with his hands in his pockets as they walked. His eyes were trained fully on the ground and Maya briefly wondered if he was thinking about the mosaic too.

“It is, though.” Maya stooped down to pick up another pebble, causing her brother to come to a stop beside her. “Just the way we say these things are dead, when really they’re more alive than they ever were before.”

Dante sighed before he responded. “We say they’re dead because they represent something that’s dead.”

Maya supposed this was true. All of these cars had been abandoned here in the Industrial Purge. They were ‘given back to the earth’, you might say. Her generation’s way of killing the sins committed by their predecessors.

Maya stood up, wound her arm back, and flung the pebble as hard as she could manage.

It flew in a high arc, for one moment free of the earth. Free from contact with it, anyway; she knew this pebble would likely never experience true freedom from this planet, untethered entirely from its gravitational pull. She recalled her physics lectures from last summer: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Just as the pebble races down to meet the earth, the earth races up to meet it.

The pebble, now merely a moving speck, collided with the water and sent chaos rippling over its previously glasslike surface. Maya could only assume it was sinking now, dragged closer and closer to the bottom by the same force that pulled it from the sky.

Maybe everything would be better if the earth didn’t chase after the things that tried to get away from it.

She shuffled her feet in the damp dirt. Adding to the surface mosaic, while also destroying everything underneath it in the process. She stooped down again and placed her fingers into the roused soil. Her nails made long gouges in it, and she wondered how many places she’d have to press her hand into the earth before she’d make perfect contact with the print of someone else’s.

She could be connected to that person, far beyond the barrier of time. And who would know how long ago that person’s touch had first been recorded? She could hold hands with a dead person— her aunt once told her that you’re never truly dead until you’re forgotten. In that case, the person whose handprint she touched would no longer be dead, but rather in a space somewhere between dead and alive, for the brief instant of their contact. Whether this would be healing for them, for her, or for the earth, she couldn’t specify. Maybe all three. Maybe none.

But the earth needed it the most, that was for sure. It had too many scars for its own good. The people who had it before her had hurt it. She didn’t know how, or why. All she knew was that she could feel the injury— healing, but still there.

“Is it really justice to kill the thing that hurt you?” she murmured.

Dante didn’t look at her. He’d taken the liberty of leaning against a tree with one shoulder, gazing out at the lake as if she wasn’t there. “Never thought I’d hear you say something like that,” he said. There was a poke of humor in his words, but his voice was heavy. “I don’t know. I guess not.”

“But then is it justice to give life back if you took it away...? From a sinner.” She continued slowly, hands still in the earth. “Like a murderer.”

A moment of silence. Then Dante shook his head, turning over his palms as if to say, why even ask? “I can’t answer that.” He scoffed, then said, “Maybe you should ask the cars.”

Maya often wondered if she was going crazy.

But then she’d force herself to recall that even if she was, there was nothing that she or anybody else could do about it. She had her brother here and she was sure that he was real, if nothing else in this world was. To prove this point, she pinched him.

“Ow,” he barked, and slapped her arm. “Don’t touch me with your dirty hands.”

She expected further retaliation but he offered none. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge it further. Not even with a question.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I pinched you?” she said indignantly.

“No.” He straightened up his posture and kept staring out at the lake, without so much as a glance at her. “I’m not.”

Maya shifted her feet. The lake’s ripples toyed with the reflections on them, rolling them around, their own little version of the earth that she could never go to, no matter how much she wanted to. She could plunge herself into the fragmented reflection of her world and only end up sinking, submerged in blue-green darkness, with dead-alive cars as her company. “I did it to make sure you were real.”

Dante finally looked at her, and an emotion registered in his face that she couldn’t quite interpret. A vague mixture of concern and skepticism, as if he, too, thought she was crazy.

But crazy was better than dead-alive.

“We should head back soon,” he said in a softened voice.

Maya didn’t respond. She merely hummed in agreement and plucked a leaf from a nearby branch, crushing it in her hands.

And so they tracked the mosaic back again. Maya glanced at the settling water as they walked, the ripples she’d created hardly visible now, and wondered if the pebble had made it to the graveyard.