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Miles Bradley's On Corpses
“HE IS THE WORLD'S MOST TIRED MAN. Unfortunately he
has always boasted to his friends about how little he
sleeps, so they refuse to take his claim seriously. They say
that there must be other men, in other parts of the world,
who have gone weeks without sleep, who have walked for
days without rest through deserts to fetch water for their
wives. ‘Who are these men?’ he asks, ‘Where are these
deserts?’ His friends do not know, so they do not answer.
He knows this is bullshit. He knows you die if you go that
long without sleep. But now he must try. If that is what it
will take to prove to these assholes that he is the world’s
tiredest man then he will go weeks without sleep and
then he will die. They won’t be able to disagree with that.
Corpses are hard to argue with.”
This is the short story I have just written, after
weeks of planning. I want to really spend some time
editing it and honing it and cutting out the unnecessary
details. Right now, doing any kind of work is being made
extremely difficult by Michael.
Michael died some time ago and has, for the last
few days, been haunting me. Badly.
I tell him that if he were a proper ghost, he
would constantly make my life a misery, not just sit there
on my sofa watching my TV and spouting banal trivia.
“Is that not making you miserable?” Michael
asks. I tell him it’s pretty much the same as when he was
alive.
On Thursday, we watch a game show together
while I eat lunch. Michael has just woken up. (He sleeps
in the kitchen, on the table, on his back. I don’t know
why). The woman in the orange sweater has been asked
a question about cars; she does not know the answer.
Neither do I. A moment of silence follows as an ad break
begins.
“You know,” Michael says, “I’m all for feminism,
but I think at some point we have to acknowledge that
men are just better than women at certain things.”
I tell him that he is the worst ghost and that if he
weren’t lacking a physical body or, more likely, he weren’t
just a figment of my imagination, I would brain him with
the TV remote (which he has not let go of since he got
here. He sleeps holding it. Again, no idea).
Michael is offended and upset by the suggestion
that he might not be real. “I’m offended and upset!” he
tells me. “I am real. What about the ducks?”
I don’t want to think about the ducks. Every day
since Michael arrived, the ducks have gathered outside
the living room between 11am and 3pm. They are black
except for a band of white on their heads and then their
feet are... their feet are skeletal. White, uncovered bone
with all the joints at strange angles.
I look out at the ducks. Michael walks to the
window and taps on it. The ducks all stare at him – ten,
maybe twenty of the things. He has a point. The ducks are
definitely real. I know this for a fact because they keep
shitting on my patio.
