Memoirs of the Living Dead

Death. Decay. Decomposition. 

As long as I can remember, I’ve been infatuated by the morbid and macabre. The world around me was filled with death. I was acutely aware, more than any of my peers, what “entropy” truly meant.

The world was different for us. Being revenants, as well as satellites of the clan of death, we had a unique perspective. A bastardization of Catholicism and Italian-American culture led to a cabal of incestuous, spirit-enslaving undead tyrants. Our reputation is well earned, to say the least.

When I was a little girl, I liked to imagine myself playing with the other girls I saw from my bedroom window. They looked to be about my age. They would laugh and cry and run and sit, and revel in their mirth. There was a particular group of girls I often saw playing in the woods across from the manor. Five girls, sometimes six, who would regularly come out and enjoy life together. I remember watching them almost every weekend. My twin sister Agatha and I would sometimes sit and imagine ourselves down there, among them, playing their running-games.

There wasn’t much for us to do on the family estate, where we lived. The property was surrounded on all sides by forestry, and we were told (likely correctly) that if we were ever to wander off, we would be killed by werebeasts. With each other as our only company, we would play together regularly, my sister and I.

We would often take trips to the family cemetery, before we were moved to the manor on the hill. Growing up as twin revenant girls in Nowhere, New Jersey meant that we had few friends this side of oblivion. The other girls were scared of us. She and I would go there, sometimes, and commune with the spirits. We had this gift, you see - the ability to speak to the dead, without any prior knowledge of necromancy. It was much stronger in me, as compared to my sister, though. Where I could have full-blown conversations with them, Agatha felt mostly fleeting emotion dotted with contextless phrases. I had to help her to converse, but I didn’t mind.

Anyway, over the course of a year or two (before Mother discovered our habit), we had become quite the friends to many of the ghosts occupying the graveyard. As we got to know them, we came there more and more often. It was the only place we could go to socialize or have fun, really.

As I said before, my sister and I had few friends. We weren’t allowed to enroll in public school because of our nature as revenants, and most of the other girls hated or feared us. Usually both. There was one time, though, where I had managed to befriend a small group of the other estate girls. I didn’t know them too well, and they didn’t know me, but there was a small amount of chemistry. Enough, apparently, that when I invited them to come play with me, they agreed. They didn’t know where they were going, but I convinced them to, hesitantly, follow me to the cemetery, as that was where I usually played.

To their credit, they tried to keep as much of an open mind as a nine-year-old possibly can. Eventually, though, I ended up arguing with the girls. The words are hazy to me, like much of the time before being moved. The specifics don’t matter, though. Not really.

Before continuing, I feel it is important to clarify - I’ve always seen the world through a particular lens. My familial curse means that my eyes view things through the veneer of deathsight - I see the world the way wraiths do. I see things not as they are, but as they one day shall be. I see healthy people as withered & pale cadavers, complete with the wounds they one day will suffer. Fully functional vehicles as dented, scraped wreckages. Buildings are ruins. Paint appears to be peeling off the wall. Metal looks to be rusted and bent. This partially means I am able to see the world as it will be, able to take a glimpse of our macabre future, but it mostly means I am unable to see the world as it is today.

When she started crying, I reacted poorly. I didn’t sympathize, because I didn’t understand why I should. I didn’t apologize - I did nothing wrong. This is not the response the girls were looking for. 

They confronted me, and were getting aggressive. There were probably five of them, and my sister was sick, and so stayed home. I didn’t know what to say - I didn’t know what I’d done wrong to begin with.

It’s probably possible that I could have defused the situation. Fixed things, made it better. I did not.

Following an extraordinarily poor sequence of actions on my part, the girls had gone from being confrontational because of my apparently rude acts to becoming openly hostile. I’ve always been physically weak, having been born with a muscle condition that made me significantly weaker than any of my peers. One of the girls pushed me to the ground, and I hit my head on a tombstone on the way down. Hard. Hard enough that if I were a normal girl, I would have been seriously hurt. 

Warm blood trickled down my scalp, sticking to my hair and staining my clothes. I felt the cool, wet soil of the cemetery between my fingers, and heard the voices of children come to an abrupt stop following the sickening sound of my skull cracking on cold hard stone. Though just a moment, it felt like eternity. As if I were back in the womb, floating once more in the amniotic sac. Until it was over.

I could tell you I don’t know what happened to me that day, or that I was possessed by something completely unlike me. I could weave some tale about a ghost who intervened on my behalf. I could tell some sweet little lie that makes me look like the good guy, and push the blame onto someone else. I will not. I chose to pick up a piece of tombstone that had crumbled onto the ground, and I made the decision to use it as a weapon against her. I wasn’t consumed by anger - I felt the way I always had.

The world was different, after that. Mother found out, and we were moved to study in the manor. Antonio Rossellini, the ‘Capo’ of Newark (and my great grandfather), was impressed by what happened in the cemetery. He discovered my and my sisters’ ability to speak with the dead, and had us moved to the manor to be groomed to become esteemed assets to the family. I still think about that day, on occasion. It taught me something. I’m better now because of it. I know I am.

Later, after being moved to the manor, I rarely was allowed to leave. Over time I heard from my tutor the news of the outside world. The end of the great war, the beginning of the cold war. I heard second-hand as most of my brothers were killed, one after another, because of their gross incompetence. I heard tidbits of news about Cosa Nostra, and about family businesses, but I had little interest. It was matters of Oblivion that caught my attention.