Have You Ever Heard a Dead Man Moan? by Cory Bennet

I opened the door and there he was. I'd been looking for a few minutes, in the backyard, in his room and office, but I finally found him hanging in the garage. The extension cord was tied around a wooden rafter and looped back around his neck. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his tongue lay outside his mouth, swollen. His stomach, full of something, bulged outward. He was wearing his Caterpillar work boots, which floated just above a tool box.

I stared at him for a long time. It wasn't that I didn't know what to do, or that I was scared, it was more like I was studying an exhibit, for I had never seen anything so strange. A dead body.

I walked over cautiously, expecting him to awaken and go for my brains. I was close enough to see his nose hairs. He didn't smell. But his skin was stretched so thin across his face. It didn't look like him. More like a wax museum figure.

I walked back into the house and rang 911. After that I thought if i should go back in the garage or not. I did. I walked over to the work bench and took out the hedge trimmers. I clipped an invisible enemy as I walked over to the body of a man that raised me, taught me things, and ultimately caused doubt forever in my mind. I stepped up onto the toolbox and opened the trimmers, put them around the cord and snapped. He fell. His legs bent back and cracked loudly.

I pulled his legs out from underneath him and studied him more. Later, all my psychiatrists thought it a point of interest that I studied him so. What do they know?

When a dead body is thrust upon you strange things happen in your brain, terrible things, bad vibrations and evil synapses come alive.

I bent down to hear for breathing and there was none. I heard sirens so I walked outside and a battalion of emergency vehicles surrounded my house. They should've just sent the coroner, I thought. He's already dead.

They asked me where the garage was, I lead the way. They worked on him while I sat outside and finally started to cry. It was a strange crying, I wasn't crying that he was dead, I was crying that I was still alive. I was afraid of sleep, of dreams where his blue corpse would appear and I would ask him questions. I was scared of waking up and looking at the garage door and seeing through it, to the dead body hanging.

They pronounced him dead later at the hospital and it came as no shock to me. I saw his body and it had no life left in it. I like to pretend I'm over it but thats a fucking joke. It still haunts me daily. The bad vibrations haven't left my brain. I walk the streets and look at the ugliest population of beings I have ever seen because I know people keep secrets, and one day they will explode like a fucking grenade and the shrapnel will pierce your brain. And nothing is the same after that. And there's no one left to trust. I'm forever rattling at the gates of my conscious, desperate to change it.

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Bio:
My name is Cory Bennet and I'm 21 years old. I skateboard in the east bay.