CLOSER

Content Warning: Suicide, claustrophobic horror, body horror involving decay, suffocation, themes of grief and loss, psychological deterioration

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ONE: AWAKENING

I am breathing.

This is the first thing I know. Not my name. Not where I am. Not how I got here. Just this: lungs expanding against resistance, air moving through a throat scraped raw.

I am breathing, and something is wrong.

My hands move before the rest of me catches up. Fingers spread against a surface inches above my face. Wood. Rough grain pressing into my palms. Unfinished pine. The kind they use when they don’t expect anyone to see it.

I push. Nothing moves.

I’m in a box. No. Be specific. My brain knows what this is even if the rest of me won’t say it.

A coffin.

This is happening. This is real.

I say it out loud. My voice sounds like someone else’s. The words hit the wood above my face and fall back into my mouth.

My knees are bent, feet pressed against another panel. I straighten my legs as much as I can. Six inches of movement. The dimensions map themselves through pressure and resistance: wood above, wood below, wood at my shoulders, wood at my feet. Satin lining against my back, gone stiff with something. Moisture. Mine or something else’s.

I try to remember. Anything. A name would be good. A face. The last thing I saw before this.

Nothing. The space behind my eyes is as dark as the space around my body.

The air is already wrong. Thick. Each inhale takes effort. Each exhale doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The numbers come without permission. Coffin dimensions. Lung capacity. Rate of consumption. Somewhere between one hour and four, depending on how calm I stay.

I know this. The knowledge is there. The person who learned it isn’t.

My left arm is pinned. I try to shift and realize why: there’s something beside me. Something pressed against my entire left side, shoulder to hip.

It’s soft.

My fingers find fabric first. Coarse weave. Wool. A jacket. I follow the fabric up toward where a collar should be and find skin instead.

Cold skin. The specific cold of meat that’s been refrigerated.

I jerk away. There’s nowhere to jerk to. My shoulder hits the right wall and the motion just presses me harder against the thing on my left. I can feel the shape of it now. An arm. A torso. The curve of a shoulder blade against my ribs.

I’m in a coffin with a body.

The scream comes up before I can stop it. It hits the lid and comes back and I’m choking on it, on the thick air, on the reality of what’s pressed against me. I thrash. The coffin doesn’t care. My elbow hits something that yields like packed clay, something that makes a sound like settling meat.

I go still.

Breathe. Slower. You’re using air you don’t have.

I force my lungs into a rhythm. In for four. Hold. Out for four. The panic doesn’t go away but it compresses. Becomes something I can think around.

The body isn’t moving. Of course it isn’t moving. It’s dead.

But I’m not.

I make my left hand move toward it. My fingers find the body’s arm again. The suit jacket is wool. Heavy. Well-made. I follow the sleeve down to a wrist. A hand. Fingers curled loosely.

And then my fingers stop.

There’s a ring. Thick band, raised edges. I trace the shape. A signet ring. Square face with something engraved.

My right hand moves without thinking. Touches my own left hand.

I’m wearing the same ring.

The same weight. The same raised edges. The same square face.

I pull my hand back. Check again. Check the corpse’s hand again. The match is exact. Not similar. Identical.

This is happening. This is real.

The body is bigger than me. I can feel that now. Broader shoulders. Thicker arms. A man. His face, when I force myself to touch it: wide jaw, crooked nose, stubble coarse and thick.

Not my face. The proportions are wrong.

But we’re wearing the same ring.

I check my pockets. Left: empty. Right: something. A small rectangle. Cardboard. Stiff. I pull it out. Run my thumb across the surface. Raised letters. Embossed.

H-A-R-W-E-L-L

A space.

& S-O-N-S

Another space.

M-O-R-T-U-A-R-Y

I flip it over. More letters on this side. A name.

D-A-V-I-D P-A-U-L K-E-N-N-E-R

I wait for the name to mean something. To unlock something.

Nothing.

Just a name on a funeral home card. A name I don’t know. A ring I can’t explain.

I press my palms against the lid again. Push with everything I have. The body shifts against me, its arm falling across my chest with a sound like a bag of wet sand.

The lid doesn’t move.

I settle back. The arm stays where it fell. Cold through my shirt. Heavy.

I’m going to die here. Next to David Paul Kenner, whoever he was. In a coffin meant for one, holding two, with a ring on my finger that matches his.

The thought should be bigger. It should fill the space. But it just sits there, a fact among facts.

Unless I’m not.

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TWO: DETERIORATION

Time passes. I measure it in breaths.

Each one harder than the last. The headache started a while ago, a pressure behind my eyes that’s spreading backward into my skull. Carbon dioxide. I’m breathing my own waste, recycling poison.

The body has gotten warmer.

When I woke up, David Paul Kenner was cold. Refrigerator-cold. Now he’s merely cool. And I know exactly why.

I’m heating him. My life bleeding out through my skin, soaking into dead meat. Two masses in a closed system. Temperatures averaging toward equilibrium.

I know this. I know how bodies decay and how embalming fails and how long it takes to die in a box. The knowledge is there. The person who learned it isn’t.

That’s the joke, isn’t it? I know how to die. I just don’t know who’s dying.

The smell is changing. The formaldehyde is losing. Whatever they pumped into David Paul Kenner to keep him presentable, my heat is breaking it down. Under the chemical sweetness, something else is rising.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “I’m ruining you.”

I started talking to him a while ago. The silence became unbearable.

His arm is still across my chest. His cold seeping into me while my heat seeps into him. We’re averaging each other.

The ring is bothering me.

I touch it again. His, then mine. Same ring. Exactly the same. Not a coincidence. Not possible to be a coincidence.

I start checking the rest of him. Systematically. The panic has burned itself out, leaving something colder. Methodical. If I’m going to die here, I’m going to know who I’m dying with.

His suit jacket has inside pockets. I reach across, fingers brushing his chest. My hand finds the pocket. Finds paper inside.

I pull it out. Fold it open. Run my fingers across the surface.

More embossed text. But different this time. Larger letters. Fewer of them.

I-N L-O-V-I-N-G M-E-M-O-R-Y

A space. Then a name.

D-A-V-I-D P-A-U-L K-E-N-N-E-R

A funeral program. His funeral program.

I keep reading. More embossed letters.

B-E-L-O-V-E-D F-A-T-H-E-R

A-N-D H-U-S-B-A-N-D

I stop.

Beloved father.

My hand goes to my face. To the shape of my own jaw. My own nose. The proportions I can feel but can’t remember ever learning.

David Paul Kenner was someone’s father.

I’m in his coffin. Wearing a ring that matches his.

I know how bodies decay but not who I am. The knowledge feels borrowed. Secondhand. Like I learned it by being around it rather than living it.

By being around him.

Closer.

The word surfaces. Not spoken. Not quite thought. Something between. My brain or somewhere else. The boundary is getting soft.

I pull the body toward me. Or I pull myself toward the body. The difference is getting harder to track. We’ve been rearranged so many times I’ve lost the configuration.

“Were you my father?” I ask. “Is that why I’m here? Some kind of punishment? Some kind of... reunion?”

Nothing. The corpse doesn’t answer.

But his arm tightens around me. Or I imagine it does. Or I move in a way that makes it seem like he does.

The headache is worse. Thoughts slipping sideways, losing their shape. The air tastes like copper now. Like something breaking down inside me.

“I don’t remember you,” I tell him. “I should, shouldn’t I? If you were my father. I should remember something.”

A smell. Cigarettes. Wool and cigarettes.

The jacket. His jacket. I’m smelling his jacket.

But it feels like a memory. It feels like something from before.

Closer.

The word again. Clearer this time. Not my voice.

I press my forehead against his shoulder. The chemical smell is stronger here. The decay underneath.

“I don’t know how to get closer,” I whisper. “I don’t know what you want.”

But I do. Of course I do.

Two masses in a closed system. Temperatures averaging.

He wants what physics wants. Equilibrium. He wants me to stop being different from him. He wants me to catch up.

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THREE: DISSOLUTION

I don’t know when the cold stopped mattering.

David Paul Kenner is still here. His arm around me. Or my arm around him. We’ve been like this for a while now. Hours. Days. The time has stopped meaning anything.

We’re the same temperature now.

I checked. Pressed my hand to his chest and then to my own and there was no difference. Equilibrium. Physics doing what physics does.

The headache has become everything. Not pain anymore. Just pressure. The feeling of being squeezed from inside.

I try to remember his face. The face I touched when I first woke. Wide jaw. Crooked nose.

I try to remember my face. I never touched my own face. I don’t know what I look like.

Maybe I look like him. Maybe I always looked like him.

Closer.

The word is clearer now. Closer to external than internal. Like someone whispering from a long way away. Or very, very near.

“I’m trying,” I tell him. Or tell myself. The distinction doesn’t matter anymore.

My fingers find the ring on his hand. Then the ring on mine. I slide mine off. My fingers are clumsy, swollen. The ring doesn’t want to go.

I hold it in my palm. Then I reach over and feel for his ring.

I can’t tell them apart.

I can’t remember which one I took off.

I can’t remember which hand is mine.

This is happening.

The mantra is breaking down. Losing words the way I’m losing oxygen.

This is.

“Who am I?” I ask. The last question. The only question.

And something answers.

Not a voice exactly. A presence. An understanding. The way you know something in a dream without anyone telling you.

You know who you are. You’ve always known. You just didn’t want to.

The funeral program in my pocket. In his pocket. Someone’s pocket.

Beloved father.

The ring on my finger. On his finger. Both fingers.

I was never in the coffin with a stranger. I was never here with someone I didn’t know.

The air I’m breathing. His air. My air. The same air we’ve always shared.

You came to say goodbye, something whispers. You came to be close to him one more time. And then you didn’t leave.

I see it now. Not a memory. Something worse. The shape of what happened.

The funeral home. After hours. The coffin open for one last look. The pills I took before I came. The decision I made when I was too grief-sick to make decisions.

Climbing in.

Pulling the lid down.

Waiting to join him.

Closer, he says. Or I say. Or we say together.

I’m not dying with a stranger. I’m dying with my father. I chose this. I climbed into this box and pulled the lid shut and waited and somewhere in the waiting I forgot why, forgot who, forgot everything except the warmth and the cold and the slow work of averaging.

My father’s arm is around me. Has been around me since the beginning. I arranged it there. I positioned us like this. And then I forgot that I was the one who did it.

The last breath is small. Barely a sip. The air has nothing left to give.

Neither do I.

Closer.

Yes. Finally. This is what I came for. This is where I wanted to be.

I press my face against his chest. The wool and the cigarettes and the chemical sweetness. The smell of him. The smell of us.

Two masses in a closed system.

Temperatures averaging toward equilibrium.

At last.

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