Instalment One Hundred and Six

Refrigerator sat in the corner and hummed. This was done to annoy me. The room would be silent, I would just be falling asleep when…

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

What? I would enquire.

Nothinngngngngngngngngngngngngngng.

Why do you do that, randomly make that noise?

It means I’m workingngngngngngngngng, came the reply.

After a while Refrigerator would randomly stop the humming.

Sometimes Refrigerator would start flicking the light on and off.

It was my fault, we had no privacy.

We lived in a house without a fourth wall, I had broken it early in the lease while drunk, exposing us to each other, the elements, the outside world and to anyone reading this story.

Is it a fridge or a real person? a reader asked.

I haven’t decided yet, the worried author typed unsure how this story got away from him so quickly.

I squeeze the pillow to my head in an effort to dampen the chatter. When I get too tired I forget things.

How this all started. My name.

“You’re a character,” my father would say when I was in trouble as a child.

You are a character typed the relieve author.

You are Character, he retyped as correction.

I’m Character I mumbled.

Instalment One Hundred and Five

The dead had risen. They were coming down Main Street before anyone spotted them. The first scream should’ve been a warning, by the time I was at the window that scream became a chorus and I knew something terrible had happened.

Mind you, I was busy with my own problems.

I had been up half the night sand-bagging the house before coming to town to protect the shop. The flood waters hit around noon. Sandbags at front and back doors, the stock on tables and the electric pump running to bail out the water. My first mistake, the power went, so I was down to buckets and brooms to save the shop.

It was dusk when I heard the screams. The flood waters had come from the south of town through the cemetery, a cemetery that serves five counties.

Coffins are full of air, polished pine and oak makes for a fine sea going craft and sitting water softens freshly dug soil.

As the last month of funerals bobbed down Main Street, carried by rising flood waters, the Town of Resurrection gather at our windows to farewell them a final time, each worried that we would soon join the parade.