We were at it for a long while. Didn’t hit his coffin until three-10. I know because I checked my watch when I got in the truck eventually. My hands vibrated once I finally struck the top of the coffin—I tossed the shovel to the side, almost hitting Amber who was sitting on the edge of the hole dangling her boots down.

“Mark—!”

I didn’t answer; I got on my knees and dug with my hands, launching clods of dirt and muddied soil behind me as I quarried just like Lucky. She was saying something, she might have even been shouting, but I didn’t hear her. And when my hands felt the smooth outer-wood of the coffin I couldn’t contain myself, we had been at it for hours and now I could see my reflection in the polish—the whole time she was illuminating me in my work with a flashlight, even if the moonlight might have sufficed that night.

“Mark, god damn it, Mark!” Now she cut through.

I stared up at her, on my knees as I held my hands tightly against the frame of the box.

“There’s someone.” She motioned behind her in a short manner, then turned off her flashlight. I held my breath. If we did get caught we’d just say we were grave robbers, maybe we could convince him that the two of us had fallen on hard times and we were just trying to make some money; and maybe he’d be sympathetic. I was lying to myself but it helped.

Amber laid on the ground, ruining her clothes in such a way that I had to hear all about it on the eventual drive back to my house. He didn’t even notice us, she was worried about nothing—I thought that surely he would’ve seen a beam of light. Who in their right mind would go to mourn at a grave at three in morning? Better yet, who in their right mind would’ve taken the job of a night guard at a cemetery? Perhaps it wasn’t that bad, a short hourly check—walking down the lanes could’ve been calming for him. Never mind that, he was gone now.

“Mark!” She was whisper-shouting. Now she peeked her head over the edge, much like how she positioned her boots not but a few moments before.

Again, I didn’t answer her, I just looked up and out of my shallow hovel.

“It’s probably locked, how are we going to open it?”

I looked back at my warped reflection in the shiny black, I constricted myself slightly in my puffer jacket. My hands clawed at the coffin lip as I did my best to try and open it in the confined space.

I desired to look upon him again—to peer at his brown and frazzled hair, to feel it twisting and twirling about my fingers like I had a few times before, to look at his fair skin and gaze into those eyes that entrapped me. To feel him embrace me, like when he hugged me before he left my house the morning after that first party. The night that I learned of his death I dreamed that perhaps I would, at one time, be lying in bed with him, atop covers, me coddled in his arms with no troubles on my heart; he would entangle my hair in his fingers as well, rub my back and tell me that I didn’t need to worry. I could wait at the sidelines after a game, for him to come and greet me, for me to ask him how he felt during the game, for me to hand him his water bottle as he tried his best to catch his breath, as I stared up into those burning blue eyes. And maybe he could tell me something like, “Yes, I did like her for a short while, but that doesn’t matter anymore. I got over it because now I have you instead, and you’re much better than her, Mark.” Then maybe I could call him in the late hours of the night, when my mind is spinning and I have no one else to talk to, even if she would have picked up the phone just as fast as he would.

“I swear to God if we came here and we dug for this long just so that we can’t open the damn—!”

Even though I could’ve stared up at her from down below for the third time, my face splattered with mud and my hair stained with sweat now almost freezing in the fall night air, I didn’t. “I have a hatchet in my truck.”

“Your keys?”

I tossed them up to her.

“Where’d you buy a hatchet? I thought you weren’t allowed to have weapons anymore.”

A nod from me—I don’t know why I did that. “I took it from my grandpa’s shed.”

“You brunettes are all the same.”

Just barely I could hear the sound of her unlocking the door, perhaps her whispering to herself something about not being able to see in the back seats with how dark it was; when she got down on her stomach the flashlight had fallen down into the hole with me.

Mumbling under my breath before she returned: “And yet dad lets me have alcohol.”

Not so precariously she tossed the hatched down to me—I didn’t even have the flashlight on, she could have easily hit me with it and knocked me out cold. Thankfully, it landed on the coffin. I took it up in my hands and held it far above my head; as I did so I felt the slightest flurry of raindrops begin to fall upon my jacket and face, as I strained my eyes to see through the darkness. One cut didn’t do the trick—neither did five, or fifteen. Already tired from digging, I strained every possible muscle in my upper torso in order to cut away the last thing that separated me from Lucas. We neglected to think about how, even if we cut through the lumber, we still had the trouble of trying to get him through the hole we made. That didn’t matter and I hadn’t even realized that in the first place yet.

About twenty-5 cuts deep and I had breached, to be met with white cloth of silken pillows. With my same bare hands that I heaved up mud with I pried off chunk after chunk, splinter after splinter, to throw it out of my burrow, up towards Amber watching from above. Soon, the top of the casket was gone, save for only a few bothersome plush scraps—and there, in the deepest slumber, was he. Now, once again, I was on my knees, with him between my legs as I dared to touch his hands and unfold his arms. He was buried in his jacket, that same jacket that he wore everyday through the halls of our school, that same jacket that he wore on the night of the first and second party, that same jacket that he wore as he leaned over me at the water fountain. His parents requested that he be buried with it.

“And how do we get him out?”

I didn’t respond, and I think that she had grown accustomed to that; my hands then laid upon his chest as I stared at my companion’s visage.

“God damn it Mark!”

So she broke me from my trance. “Amber?”

“How do you plan on getting him out of there?”

“Come down here.”

She refused.

“I ask that you come down here. Or am I going to have to try and hoist him up?” Though I was trying my hardest to sound sarcastic I do not think she caught on.

“That sounds like the best idea.”

Sarcasm was her natural state of mind; at all times it was what she resorted to and now, for some reason that I couldn’t even begin to try and understand, it was alien to her.

I held onto the sides of his jacket, gripping at the somewhat soaked cloth and leather, to then tug upwards and force him into an upright position. His movements were jagged and yet taught—he partially refused to comply. And I am not the strongest person, I barely had trouble moving my dresser even with the help of my own father, having to maintain control of one of the sides when lifting it. I heaved upward again, trying desperately to reach within myself and pull out some sort of strength that I held deep in my being. My eyes clenched shut, barely any visual contrast to the dark night, and when I opened them he awkwardly leaned his back against the hole’s wall. He was now at the height for Amber to reach down into the pit and grip his jacket’s shoulders; carefully, she did so. Precariously, actually. And I pushed upward against his body, in the direction of the watchful moon above—as detrimental as it was to my own masculinity she was just barely stronger than me.

“I think he’s slipping Mark!”

I exhaled deeply as I exerted all force, hoping that she would do the same. Then, in an act of God, he came to the surface, to the land of the living even. Laying on damp grass with his legs awkwardly bent and hanging in an uncomfortable position at the side of the hole, I climbed up to see his corpse.

“And the truck now.”

We decided that it would be better if, instead of dragging him along the ground and over to the bed of my truck we, instead, backed the truck up and near the hole; that was, of course, after we drug him about ten feet. Dragging him risked ruining his jacket. And just as when we brought him up and out of his grave, jointly we brought him from the ground and into the truck bed. Up with the tailgate—inside the car, in the darkness, I heard Amber barely say something in an uttering fashion, so much so that I couldn’t even make out what she said.

“What was that?”

“The dirt.”

She was right. If anyone saw that he had been deliberately taken out of the grave then who was to say that we wouldn’t be the first ones that they questioned. I spent two hours afterward, with her sitting on the reopened tailgate and watching me, shoveling the dirty back into the pit and continuing my burdensome sweating. Five-30 just about and we feared the approaching daylight—with every passing minute the potential for someone to see us increased dramatically.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Amber came to grips with our reality before I did. And of course, there wasn’t much to come to grips with really. No, instead she was paranoid, worried about nothing. The question of where we were to store him didn’t bother me; like my grandpa, I had a shed in my backyard as well, that was the simplest solution. And since we didn’t have school in the morning, we could use as much time as we needed—it was a Sunday, after all. I didn’t dare to even try and console Amber, I let her figure it out herself. She wasn’t crying, don’t think I have barely ever seen her cry. Perhaps once, when she was drunk, out of control of her own emotions, and it was completely possible that it was spurred on by some ridiculous factor that never would have caused her such sorrow if she was sober. Though I knew when she was upset, when she was concerned with something completely different than the task at hand; she would become disconnected from everything around her. And I felt as though I was reliving the same night some eleven months ago in November, the night she spoke to Lucas after the football game and I drove her home—there, in that same seat, even though she had just met him, she already was heartbroken over the fact that he most definitely didn’t like her back. Of course she had seen him in passing in the hallway, even watched him on the field when she did cheer, but she never had a direct conversation with him until then—until he acted as though he had interest in her. And I was the same. And maybe that’s just what he was great at.

We had upturned a corpse, exhumed him from his resting place. At the very least we had displaced him from a place of comfort, yet what we had in store for him was far greater than any sort of burial practice that he was given. And I didn’t care, and I still don’t.

“This was a terrible idea.”

“This will be a great idea.”

“We can’t do this.”

“Of course we can, what’s stopping us?”

“I want to get out of the car.”

“We’re going far too fast, we can get out when we pull into my driveway.”

“Mark, I want out now.”

“You can wait.”

“Mark.”

Though I knew that I had better judgment I went against my gut feeling, pulling over to the curb and just barely scraping it with my tire and quite possibly bumper, allowing her to leave the safety of the truck and stand on the concrete abutment. “Mark, we can’t keep a dead body in a shed.”

I attempted to stand uncorrected. “He’s not going to be a dead body.”

She started to do the same thing that I was doing earlier: she refused to respond.

“Thousand-900 and eighty-seven A.D. October the tenth.’

“What do you mean?”

“That’s this year.”

And again, she didn’t respond.

“Coffins are mentioned four times within the entirety of Oliver Twist.” I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Four times.”

Still, she didn’t respond.

“Four times seems like quite a lot if you think about it.”

Silence.

“Ridiculous, really.”

Somehow I had coaxed her back into the truck. More likely she had realized the sheer cold of the outside night air and that she’d rather be in the cab with me than out, alone in the fog. Fog had been creeping about, manifesting from the ground and now coming up to my headlights, only a matter of time before it obscured my vision and we were already rather limited on our amount of time to return back to my house.

“Four doesn’t seem like enough.”

I smiled. “Is that so?”

“Of course, considering how that story goes,” she said, doing her best to get comfortable in her seat.

☠ ☠ ☠

The awful sound that he made when he expelled from his lungs and stomach that foul smelling, putrid concoction of chemicals that I had no knowledge of nearly pushed me to evacuating my guts as well. She refused to be present during the operation, he laid arms and legs stretched across the table, strapped down by my father’s belts that I had nailed to a workbench. It wasn’t often that I wore my glasses, but I thought it necessary for such an endeavor. That is, of course, he vomited when he stood, not when he was supine. I fixed his hair, I cut his fingernails, I shaved his face, I parked my truck in front of the open garage door to run red and black jumper cables into my new laboratory. I failed biology. She made me swear on a Bible before I began the operation, a testament to a God that she had sworn off years before. I would have rathered he thrown up in the road-side drainage grate than in my neighbor’s bushes, but I couldn’t stop him—he was a hulking, twisted beast of movement. Of burden as well.

Amber sat in my living room, completely disconnected from my surgery, if it would even be fitting to call it that. He didn’t spill any of the bile on his chest or his stomach thankfully. I feared to touch him, afraid that at any moment he might limp and run down the road. That was an issue as well: his right leg was broken from the crash, the event that unfortunately took him away from me in the first place. By six we had an hour left until the sun fell on October 11th; I approached him sheepishly, carefully, with his best interest in mind as I motioned for him to follow him. I was completely wrong in my first assumption—he wasn’t afraid of me at all, he was just indifferent. He refused to speak, he quietly inferred with his blue eyes now turned ghost-gray. His skin was much the same, gone from the fair yet lightly tan complexion that he originally had to now a pale silver.

My words were brief, as again, I didn’t want to scare him—I didn’t want to scare him, Lucas. I briefly thought back to how he writhed about on my operating table, whether it was in pain or major discomfort or something else in between, electricity pulsing through his corpse. I thought I had gone crazy—but no, I wasn’t crazy, as there he stood before me in flesh and blood once again. He wasn’t a ghost because I could feel him, and how cold he was to the touch. And he let me touch him, he did not pull back, just looked upon me with dull eyes with dark shadows around them. I was the first to greet him back into the world. And even his jacket felt frostbitten.

He took my glasses from my face, off of my nose, and put them on himself.

As I kept my eye on him, making sure to keep him within my peripheral vision, I opened the door to the mudroom and shouted to my lab partner who refused to be a part of the experiment. Her voice distant, she refused to believe what I told her until she laid eyes upon him herself; I should have called her Thomas, I could’ve.

Maybe in three minutes I would have woken from my dream, holding onto my sheets as I sweat in the solitude of my room, hearing the tapping of a branch on my window in a storm. Maybe his death would have been a nightmare and his resurrection a fantasy. But it wasn’t; neither of them were. She didn’t pinch me.

My first concern while Amber made her way to the garage was to turn off the truck. My second was that even though I had done my best at the cemetery to protect his jacket, I had burnt two patches on the front from the use of the jumper cables. She dropped a glass of water, the dish taken from the cupboard and now a thousand pieces on the floor—and though he jumped he didn’t run. His senses were still heightened since his awakening, I would think. Before she could let out her scream I rushed to her side, clasping my hand over her mouth and putting my other hand upon her shoulder, to then walk with her slowly to my Lucas and formally introduce them to one another.

He didn’t stretch out his hand when I brought her out. He looked upon her, his face fit with my glasses, and didn’t speak a word—I don’t even know if he thought a singular thought. Instead, his eyes left her and looked to me. And through his stare my blood tried to run ice cold, yet the passion for him burned far too bright for it to have any effect on me. “Amber, this is Lucas V. Beaumont; Lucas,” I dared to see if he would respond to me calling him by his name, “this is Amber.” Though her hand was shaky I believe that she quickly came to realize just like I that this was not a hallucination, that she was not stuck in a purgatory-like dream. I whispered into her ear, “he’s real.”

“This is Lucas,” maybe she was trying to say it to me and she made it appear to be a self affirmation. “Hi, Lucas.”

I would’ve thought that she would have been more obsessed with the idea of his return. Excited to a ridiculous degree, possibly. But we still had the concern of his shuffling movements as his leg was still broken—I failed biology, I had not the slightest clue of how to fix it.

A dead body is significantly heavier than I thought—it could have been that his embalming fluid added to his weight, but then again he was a football player. Even though I had gone about my work as if there wasn't a second thought, I still severely doubted whether or not I would succeed. And if I didn't then it didn't matter. I had him with me, in my garage, to eventually be placed within my shed, and that's all that matters. But now he was in front of me and her, living dead, standing in the doorframe of my garage.

I'd played Dungeons and Dragons a few times before. The kid who organized its name was Roger—he listened to rock, screamed at his parents, refused to cut his hair even though his father insisted he did. There was a necromancer when we played. I met Roger through Amber.

Of course, he was a looming figure, his shadow projected on us from the truck headlights. I had taken off the cables but hadn’t shut off the car. And the fog still crept in, it wrapped itself about his legs. He was awkward in his stance.

He slept in my room. I have no idea if he "slept" in the living sense, but he was present. Sleeping on his back like before wouldn't have worked, the worry that he would get stuck in it or have difficulty getting into it in the first place. Without help from either of them I retrieve a mattress from the basement. During that time Amber had to watch over him, sitting politely yet uncomfortably on my dad's velvet couch, his hands at his sides, all the while she stood as close as she possibly could to the front door. I knew that she wouldn't leave—though she most likely feared him, her morbid fascination was too great. He didn't speak to her, I don't think he could.

Before I let him into my room I forced him to shower. It wasn't that he stunk, and if he did I couldn't tell, but that he was covered in rain-slicked mud, his hair was a mess even though I had done my best to fix it. I suggested to Amber that she help me with getting him to the bathroom—she refused. She didn't want to touch him. I didn't mind, she confused me.

I had him shower in his boxers, I wanted him to keep his dignity. After almost slipping three times he was safely leaning against the tiled wall, standing in the tub. As the room steamed I exited, to find Amber outside the door.

"He's in."

It was ridiculous to her. "'He'? So we're calling him a he?"

Was she questioning his awareness, his self? "Why wouldn't we? He is Lucas. You said so yourself.”

Apparently, she didn’t recognize his independence.

He definitely didn’t sleep because I awoke in the middle of the night to him with his head placed against the window, staring out into the street—frightened for a quick moment I sat up in my bed, to then realize that my companion had possibly had a nightmare. “Lucas?”

His eyes rolled to the right in his skull, his head sliding to the side to look at me as he remained dependent on the glass to keep him up right.

“So you know your name. Go back to sleep.”

He coughed in his mouth—did he breathe?

And I was right, of course: the shower had warmed him. In my embrace he was no longer cold to the touch. Sure, he was still slightly freezing, but he was warmer than he was before, and I didn’t really mind it at all.

Swaddled in those covers I remembered the wintry days before her dad was gone, when she would be picked up at three o’clock and I would have to stand, shivering, waiting for mom. How I used to wipe at the snot that came down onto my lip, tightly holding onto the straps of my bookbag and chattering my teeth. But there, in bed, I wasn’t alone like I was on the sidewalk, with everyone gone because their parents showed up on time. They didn’t have to wait till five, close to when the sun decided it wanted to leave too.

I wish he had gone to sleep, and I know that I did. Even if he was a little cold it didn’t matter, the covers and sheets helped with that. And I would have thought that he was tired, but maybe it made sense because he was sleeping for a few days. Amber slept on the couch—she’d done it before, when we were much younger and I was still living with my mother. She let us have sleep overs but we always had to sleep in separate rooms.