MEMENTO MORI

Content warnings: internalized ableism, death, grave robbing, bad coping mechanisms, discussion of medical procedures.

In his line of work, you got to know coffins pretty well.

Any kind of burial situation, really. From people who wanted to be fertilizer to stone mausoleums to cryogenics to just a plain old coffin, he’d seen it all. His personal preference was the fertilizer—being buried under and within a living thing gave them a little bit of juice, made them easier to wake up afterwards. Sure, sometimes they had some roots in them. But that wasn’t so bad after you got used to it.

He knew about dead people. Everything about them. And unfortunately, he also knew about dying people too.

Both of these things were from personal experience.

Of course, he wasn’t actively dying. Not usually, and not now. This was his one point of reassurance as he sat half-awake in the emergency room, the familiar stick of IV tape on his arm and scratch of a hospital bracelet on his wrist. If he was dying, he would have felt it. He knew about dead people, and he knew about dying people, and he knew that he was neither of those, and with any luck would never be.

The night nurse came in and took his temperature and blood pressure and checked his pupil activity. She looked at his chart and said all the reassuring things nurses were supposed to say when they saw how long his list of medications was.

Someone had found him, apparently, passed out on the sidewalk by the graveyard with a big gash in the side of his head. Thankfully he had been on the way there and not the way back, he didn’t want to have to dodge a desecration charge again. The only suspicious things he’d been carrying were his digging tools, and those were small enough that he could just lie and say he’d been walking to the community garden a few blocks down.

The person who’d found him had stuck around for a bit, asked if he was okay, but they hadn’t let whoever it was come back and see him. That was good, honestly, the less they worried about him the better. And if they talked to him they might want to talk to him more. He didn’t want that. He was fine with talking to about five people total, and he didn’t want anyone new getting involved in that very delicate balance of exactly how much talking-to-people he could take before he started to get mean.

“Do you need anything? Another pillow?” the nurse asked. He shook his head. “Alright, sweetie, well, you don’t look like you have a concussion. We just want to keep an eye on you until morning, okay?”

He said something vaguely affirmative and waited until she left, and settled back against his pillow. All this being… looked at, being watched over, was so exhausting. It was half the reason he lived alone. If he'd had a roommate, or God forbid still lived with his parents, they would never have stopped worrying about him.

With any luck, this would only be his situation for a little while longer. He had already gotten an arm working, properly working, joints functional and all. The muscles had connected together and everything. He could have cried for joy, seeing how beautifully it fit together. This perfect puzzle of connective tissue and sinew and nerve.

There was something so… almost impossible about human anatomy. How fleeting it was. How easy to break. Bones could be shattered, muscles torn, eyes blinded and nerves damaged and minds unbound from reality. It could be done on purpose, or by accident, or simply just the result of slow, painful, pitiful time.

Or, in his case, shit luck.

But he was going to make his own luck. He was going to load the fucking dice.

They used to make dice out of bones, he'd read somewhere. Appropriate. Or maybe ironic. He couldn't really decide which.

Soon he would be out of the hospital. Soon he would go to the cemetery again, and take extra food this time. And he would pick up another set of bones. And he would hide them under his jacket and hurry back home, dry them out in the small window-box hidden by a tattered piece of canvas.

But for now he had to sleep.