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When the digging stopped, and the coffin opened, for a moment, there was nothing. Then all at once the silence broke, giving way to screaming.
Mac stood still, mouth agape, too stunned to even move the flashlight from illuminating the ghastly thing they’d unearthed. Charlie swore and shouted, scuttling ineffectively away from it. Frank cackled. Dennis screamed, breaking out into sobs and clinging to Dee in a way he hadn’t done since they were kids, watching Frank and their mom have one of their more vicious arguments. Dee just stared. Stared into the open grave, and suddenly, irrationally, felt like she was being swallowed by it.
In the recesses of her brain, Dee heard a voice saying she should be more upset by what she was seeing. She couldn’t place the voice. It used to sound like Dennis, when they were younger and he was still the conscience of the two of them. Dennis wasn’t saying much of anything now, he was just crying and digging his nails into Dee’s side like she was the only solid object for miles. Pathetic, another voice said from an unplaceable spot in Dee’s head. That one was definitely mom’s. But mom was nothing but a cheap-looking prop skeleton in a B-Rated horror movie, dirt-covered and maggot-infested, so Dee ignored her voice as well.
Distantly she heard herself screaming at Frank. She felt as if she’d been swept from her body. Now she was the audience of a silent film watching through the camera, watching herself stroke and coax Dennis into the car, watching Mac dart to his side. Seeing the distance Charlie was carefully keeping from Frank once he’d managed to hoist himself out of the ground, feeling a distant feeling - satisfaction, maybe - rising as she watched the car drive away without their bastard of an almost father figure, leaving him to clear up the mess.
She only became aware of herself again when she was on a couch. Mac and Dennis’ couch, she realised. It wasn’t clear how much time had passed since the graveyard or what she’d been doing in that time, but she was on the couch, wrapped in a blanket like a shock victim. Something was poking her. Someone?
“Holy shit!” Charlie jumped back, eyes so wide it was almost comical “You’re alive!”
Dee scoffed “Of course I’m alive, dickwad,”
“Are you sure? What year is it? How do you spell rat stick?”
“You don’t even know how to spell rat stick,” Dee snapped. Charlie didn’t seem to disagree with the statement. She sighed, and gestured vaguely with a hand “What’s happening?”
Charlie blinked, then seemed to catch her drift “Oh. Well, Mac wouldn’t leave Dennis alone - he’s like, totally freaking out even more than you, dude. I think he’s actually dead - And I don’t really like, drive, and you were super out of it so now I guess we’re just crashing here.”
Despite herself, Dee laughed. Judging by the way Charlie jumped again, it came out as much of a sob as it felt, but she could barely bring herself to care.
“Thanks, Charlie.” She finally managed, once the humourless laugh-weeping had run its course.
“For what?” He said, eyes wide and posture wary.
For sitting with her while she acts like a crazy person, she considered. For being the only voice in her head that doesn’t sound like it’s shooting her down for even thinking in the first place. “For helping, I guess.” She goes with.
“Oh.” He says again “You’re welcome then, I guess.”
The silence sits for another moment before she stands up, releasing her death grip on the blanket that she didn’t even realise she was keeping. Dennis. She should check on Dennis. If mom were here, what would she say? Would she be pissed at Dee for getting so hysterical over all of this, or for not caring enough? Dee halted the thoughts. Why did she care? The bitch was dead. The bitch was dead. It was funny how it all seemed way more like a big deal now she’d actually seen her body. Not freshly dead, perfectly preserved and clean like Barbara would’ve wanted, gross and fetid and unrecognisable as anything but dead. Who’s boney now, bitch?
Right, Dennis. Check on Dennis.
When she cracked open the door to her brother’s room, the feeling of being thirteen again hit her harder than it even did at the grave site. Frank was just done calling Dennis a psycho, and Barbara calling Dee a whore, and they were both sent to bed without eating, and Dee was crawling under the covers with Dennis, telling him it was alright until he finally stopped shaking and let go of that stupid stuffed elephant. But they weren’t kids, and Barbara was dead, and Mac was sitting on the bed, jumping up as soon as he saw Dee walk in.
“I’ve never seen him like this, man. He won’t talk to me.” Mac said, words fast and panicked. It was funny the way he managed to keep his eyes on Dennis the whole time, like if he looked away for a second the bed would be empty when he looked back.
Dee breathed, halfway between a sigh and a laugh, and patted him weakly on the shoulder “He’ll be fine, Mac.”
She didn’t consider it empty reassurance, though it wasn’t entirely honest. Dennis wouldn’t be fine, he hadn’t been fine a day in his life. He’d go back to being Dennis though. He always sprung back, if slightly colder than before, faster to anger and conscience just a bit smaller. Dee would never be fine either, she thought. She was destined to never be fine from the day she was given Barbara Reynolds as a mother. Nobody was asking whether she was, though.
Wordlessly, she lay by Dennis on the bed, running a long nailed hand through his hair. He relaxed into the touch immediately, eyes closing from their endless stare. Some parts of Dennis were always predictable, even when he was closer to forty than fourteen.
“You doing alright?” She asked quietly. It was a question not meant to really be answered, she was just going through the motions. They both were. Dennis nodded, slightly, as if even in the state he was in he knew this routine well. She knew he wouldn’t talk or eat for days after this, but that would be Mac’s problem to deal with, not hers. For now it was just the two of them again. Except this time, mom wasn’t in the picture. She really wasn’t. She was in the ground, Dee had seen it now, irrefutably, with her own two eyes. She was gone.
If mom had known, really known, how fucked up her and Dennis would turn out in the end, what would she have done? Would she have had some kind of Dickensian change of heart, like the kind they’d tried to give Frank a few Christmases ago? It was all idle wondering with no answers, Dee knew, but she couldn’t help but entertain it, if just for a minute.
As her eyes fluttered closed, laying inches away from her asshole of a brother, a voice in the recesses of Dee’s brain decided the world was probably a better place now that Barbara Reynolds was nothing but bones in the earth. She realised the voice was her own, and before sleep overtook her, agreed with it.
Dee was at peace, and there was silence.