my boy builds coffins
MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS
oneshot, 4132 words, PG-13
dark fluff (?) and bittersweet angst
myungzy
A/N: this is a pushing daisies/six feet under alternative universe with a dash of the virgin suicides. thank you hansung for the help with my failed grammar. and here i am killing suzy again. apologies.
my boy builds coffins for better or worse
some say it's a blessing, some say it's a curse
(he’s made one for himself and one for me, too)
Three boys were inside the car but they didn’t last long. But Bae Sue Ji - (“It’s Suzy. Stop calling me by that awful name.”) - was alive when the car filled with muddy water, and she probably felt it burning up her lungs as they failed to cling to every bit of oxygen they could. And then she was eerie and dead, her pale slightly-green skin contrasted with the mortuary table in a certain cruel way.
(Death is cruel.)
She looked delicate, thin, elegant and papery - like she always had been - and as I took her in, her ripped jeans, the golden shirt, the smear of red on her lips, it hurt in every way it could. But she came back, after all.
My mother used to paint the rooms bright colors to keep the darkness out (“It stains your soul black, this business.”) and when she pushed me into Suzy’s room against my will (“She doesn’t have siblings, be a nice neighbor to little Sue Ji”, and I was six then) it was like walking into a haven for all things good. It was so bright I was sure the darkness would never find its way there, and so I stayed. But it did, eventually - it always does.
Little Suzy and I used to play together among rows and rows of beautifully carved coffins, and it was all too morbid but kids rarely notice things like death. And then we grew up, and then - and then she evaporated in thin air, she was gone, and I was left behind with a bunch of obnoxious feelings and questions, Death and its black coffins.
When I woke her up that night, I didn’t expect anything - no answers, no memories, and no explanations. Despite persistent questions regarding her life and death that piled in my brain, I woke her up because Suzy had always exerted a certain fascination over me I could never completely fathom - alluring Little Suzy was the one thing I couldn’t really let go.
She wriggled on the table and inhaled desperately, groaning rather painfully as her body awakened, stiff limbs twitching, fists clenching and unclenching, back arching in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.
“Jesus-“ she cried, coughing up dirty river water.
I didn’t offer any help, like it was required of me.
Suzy calmed down on her own, curled up on the table like a terrified child - which triggered some of my darkest memories of her - until she finally sat up, slowly, her long legs untangling, all pale and bruised, going for miles till I didn’t know where to look anymore. Her eyes caught the silhouette of the three other dead bodies in the room, and the look that crossed her face wasn’t hurt or scared. It said assholes.
They know - the dead ones - that they’re dead. I never had to explain a thing. The living are the ones that hope for answers, mostly. So it wasn’t a surprise to me when the first thing she said was, and in my mind I could see fifteen year old Suzy lighting a cigarette; “I should’ve walked” with a completely unfazed expression on her face.
She leaned forward to get a closer look of a pair of scalpels, her dirty damp hair failing all over herself like waves. Suzy had been fond of sharp objects, and I pretended it was a normal thing, but the way her fingers held the metallic blades made my face heat up.
“I’m not looking forward to those.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“Reassuring, undertaker.”
Her voice bordered flirty, making me feel things I haven’t felt for a long time. The blood was already rushing through my body in a violent pace and I had to occupy my eyes with the clock, or the occasional drip of the sink’s faucet.
“Come on, I’ll show you the bathroom,” I said when a dull, contrived silence settled in between us.
I preferred to walk ahead of her, but the steps we took were small and her hands pulled on my shirt every now and then for balance. Sometimes they would brush against my skin and it felt like my body was ablaze, in a horribly pleasant way.
I should have washed her head and stitched her bruises on the silvery table, but the thought was pushed away and cornered somewhere in my brain by much less civil thoughts - I kept telling myself she was a girl, the girl - the first love, the only love, maybe, possibly, definitely - and she deserved one last bath, with shampoo that smelled like fruit.
Upstairs, the house was quiet. Our basement was often filled with bodies, but the hallways of my family house were empty. Our business was Death, and Death seemed to enjoy our company far too much. I rushed her through corridors that smelled like old people, embalming fluids and kimchi. They were full of doors leading to colorful rooms that didn’t reflect our lifestyle at all.
Then we were locked up in my bathroom - the same one Suzy used to brush her teeth in whenever she woke up in my bed - and she settled in the bathtub as I sat down on the cold floor. The water was too hot, the glass cuts on her arms were stinging and I couldn’t really breathe because her clothes were forgotten somewhere and her skin was all I could see.
“Can you wash my hair?”
No.
“Can’t you wash it yourself?”
But it was a stupid thing to say because I couldn’t stop staring; her bra straps were too loose, and the wet candy-colored piece of clothing pulled me closer until I had the bottle of shampoo next to me and foam on my rubber gloves.
Suzy’s hums and steam eventually filled the bathroom, and the water got stale as the minutes rolled by, turning white and dull. Her hair was clean and I sat with my back against the damp tiles as she stared at me like she was seeing me for the first time.
It got silent again, the kind of quietness that seems to happen between people after unnecessary but deliberate touching - like pulling her hair a tad stronger, or scrapping the nape of her neck with my fingers to feel her shiver.
“Do I really need to die?”
You shouldn’t have to.
“Yes.”
“Well, that sucks for me,” she hissed, standing up and stepping outside the tub with a flair of her pretty hips and an annoyed expression on her face.
She stomped out of the bathroom rather ungracefully, slipping and dripping as she went and leaving the heavy scent of orange shampoo behind her - as well as a disturbing pang on my chest I chose to ignore.
When I left the bathroom, Suzy was tucked inside a robe - mine, of course, it was blue and it had One Piece characters on it and it was embarrassing - like she had always belonged to my room, or my life, or me and once, yes, she did.
As I sutured her deeper cuts I became alarmingly aware of things I didn’t remember, or things I couldn’t ignore so easily - like the beauty mark on her left thigh, or how she was ticklish over her hipbone and the tattoo that read l’amour toujours. I didn’t have any idea what it meant.
“I’m glad you’re my undertaker, Coffin Boy.”
Oh.
Coffin Boy was my unflattering superhero name when we were kids - Suzy came up with it, of course. I was holding one of the ends of her mother’s coffin at the funeral, and that was the reason behind the name - that, and of course, my family’s business. I held her hand for the first time that day, even though Suzy didn’t shed any tears like it was expected of her nine year old self. Years later we would spend the nights at my house, smoking cigarettes in the foyer full of caskets - and sometimes we would sleep in them, our skin against the white valance, listening to each other’s heartbeats as if they were mocking Death itself. We weren’t afraid of it at all. Well, Suzy wasn’t.
I kissed her in one of those nights, and it was my first kiss - but not hers. Little Suzy, fifteen years old, wasn’t as little anymore. She was already heartbreak and teen angst in her sunny dresses and flip-flops. I was probably more in love than she was - no, I’m certain I was. Who wasn’t in love with Suzy?
“I’m not Coffin Boy anymore-“
“I don’t want to look dead, I want to look pretty,” Suzy ignored me (like she so often did when she was still alive), and her head was on my shoulder and I was sure, for a second or so, that I was developing tachycardia. Her skin was starting to feel warm again, I could feel it heating up my body; or maybe it wasn’t Suzy’s skin at all. I wanted to touch her until she was dead and cold again - but her fingers were brushing against my thigh and I froze awkwardly on my spot on the bed, my eyes at the ceiling full of the remains of plastic stars that used to glow in the dark when I was younger. “No, maybe -I want to look the way I am.”
“Still pretty.“
Bae Suzy was always terribly different in a broken sort of way; and way, way too beautiful, carelessly beautiful. Bony knees and skinny fingers and long hair and melancholic eyes - and always like a school girl pretending to be a grown up with her foul attitude and flirty eyes causing havoc and hips, hips, hips. It was unsettling.
School girls shouldn’t have been on my mind at all given the fact I was 21, but Suzy-
Suzy.
The words were barely out of my mouth and my mind was just a mess of unpoised images again, the stars and planets above us seemed to be part of a whole different life… and Suzy, Suzy, Suzy, she didn’t even give me time to breathe because she was on my lap, her weight over my legs, and it was all too intimate to feel comfortable. My hands were firmly tucked in my pockets, and I was struggling to breathe.
“I’m sorry I left you, Myungsoo.”
I tried very hard to understand the events that led to Suzy’s disappearance - I thought about her more than I’d like to admit after she was gone. The postcard she left me was still stuck behind my bed post (“I’m sorry.”), the bottles of perfume and the photographs and her favorite shirt, they were packed somewhere in my closet and I couldn’t really get rid of them. She killed herself in the river, we will never find a body to bury - that’s what they had said at the time. And yet there she was, six years later, found dead in the same river from years ago.
I still don’t know what was more heart wrenching - realizing she had left me behind in a house full of Death’s remains, or unzipping the body bag for hers.
“I don’t need an apology, it’s fine,” my voice came out much raspier than I would have liked. I sounded angry and I wasn’t. I was numb to those feelings already.
“It hurt you,” she continued, and her fingers touched my cheek. I couldn’t remember exactly the last time she touched me with such tenderness - or if she ever did. It wasn’t like Suzy. She was razor blades; I was the skin being hurt by them. “I couldn’t stand it anymore - I didn’t belong, I didn’t have anyone. But you, you had something here - your family and-”
You had me, I thought, but the words never came out.
“I missed you,” I blurted instead, meekly.
Maybe I never fell out of love with her; maybe the darkness just found its way under my skin after she was gone (like it found its way under her bedroom door years ago) - and because I was stuck in the dark, I never left it behind. I became the dark, the undertaker, the boy with the coffins; she became the ghost in the back of my mind.
“I missed you, too.”
Suzy smiled her perfectly coy smile that used to throw boys out of their ways for her. I never liked that smile because it was almost never directed at me - and because it was ever so often used to drag boys into her pink bedroom (they called it a very different name in secretive whispers across the school halls), like a mermaid that drags men into the ocean with their sweet songs and promises of love, only to kill them later. She reserved the blithe ones for me.
“Can we go to the Watcher, for old time’s sake?”
The Watcher was how we called the rooftop of my house since we were eight; a square space my family never really cared for (the basement was far more profitable), but our hideout for years. Suzy’s hideout more than mine, I could often find her there bundled in duvets from my own bed, drinking coffee from my favorite mug, reading one of my mangas. I never went back there again after she was gone.
So when we stepped outside - Suzy wearing one of my plait t-shirts that looked dangerously short on her (she had grown tall over the years, almost as tall as me) - it felt like we went back in time. The sky was still pitch black, starless, and the air felt sultry, sticky, like it usually does during high summer.
I never let them leave the morgue, the dead ones. It was against the rules - my rules, or Death’s rules, I wasn’t sure anymore. I understood why. Suzy looked undeniably alive, and I didn’t want to let her go again.
“Remember when I jumped?” she laughed, drumming her fingers on the brick rail, creating an imaginary rhythm to her words.
“You thought you could fly,” I nodded, watching her closely. “I never laughed so much in my entire life.”
“You were such a dick, Myungsoo.”
Suzy was eleven when she decided she was going to fly. I told her it was impossible, she told me she was absolutely certain she could do it. Of course she ended up breaking her arm in three places and was the school topic for the whole month - the girl who thought she could fly, Bae Sue Ji. The memory made me smile - but I turned my face away from her, because smiling at Suzy was a sign of weakness.
“Why did you leave?” (Me.)
She let go a deep sigh, as she had been waiting for that question to come up sooner or later. I didn’t intend to ask at first, I didn’t want the knowledge to haunt me later, I just wanted to see her, to touch her, to feel her breathing one last time because she was fascinating, Suzy, the girl I used to love - and I thought I was going to grow up without it, without her, until I got so old I had to make a coffin for myself and throw Suzy’s memories away - or bury them with me. I had accepted that, partly, maybe, probably.
(I hadn’t at all.)
“I told you,” her fingers danced on the rail. “I needed to go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere else,” I touched the tips of her hair, and it was a rather involuntary action, a side effect of our years as friends. “Away from here. I’m sorry I never let you know. I couldn’t afford long distance calls, I couldn’t afford anything, I guess.”
“I would have gone with you,” I admitted gruffly. “You were-“
The princess from the fairy tales I told to dead children before putting them to sleep for an eternity, sharp edges that left me behind bleeding, the colors on the walls of my house, the haggard girl crying on my doorstep, the nails digging in my skin, the whispers behind closed doors, the caskets, the dancing, the darkness under my skin, shelter, friend, best friend, love.
“Can I confess something, since I’m dead?” she exclaimed, her words coming out strangled, choked. Her dancing fingers found the seam of my shirt and she pulled me closer until I felt her inhale through the cotton fabric. I couldn’t breathe again, because Suzy felt like Suzy from six years before, but more. “I regret going away. I had to, but it didn’t make me happy. The world isn’t that great, you know - it’s cold.”
Dead people regret, and that’s why they wake up in my basement.
“I thought I was going to make it,” she scoffed, closing her eyes. “But I was coming back. I didn’t have a place to live. I didn’t have money, I just had - I thought it was going to be easy. I thought somebody would find me there. I guess I was happier here.”
Where you happier with me?
“I have something to confess, too.”
Forty-eight were the times I told Suzy I loved her and waited for an answer - but I was often left with tartly laughter, or silence, or the kind of touches that would make me shut up for good. Little Suzy was an empty black hole, while I was full of need and want and love.
She looked up at me with a blank face, her chin on my chest, waiting. The immense emptiness behind her pupils was there, reflecting my face and my hollow expression. Suzy would close her eyes in a few hours, and she would lay her head on a pillow, and she would sleep until her body - carefully embalmed by me -rotted and turned to ashes, and slowly everyone would forget about the girl who thought she could fly, enticing Suzy, hips and short shorts and light skin like white porcelain from the Joseon dinasty.
“I sold your book collection.”
(I couldn’t make that the forty-ninth time.)
Suzy looked surprised for half a second, but her face wrinkled into a smile, and she tugged on my clothes a little harder, and we were so close I thought I was going to sink into her soul. But she didn’t say anything, no snarky remarks, and no dry retorts - instead, she stared, for the longest time, like I used to stare at her when she wasn’t looking. Bony fingers touched my face as her smile faded, and Suzy looked empty again.
“Perfect Coffin Boy Myungsoo,” she whispered under her breath, and the tip of her fingers brushed my eyelashes softly. “You were always so good. I think I might have been in love with you at some point. How did I turn out so fucked up?”
How did I end up talking to corpses?
How did you end up dead?
When did you love me?
Why is it past tense?
Why-
“Will I die again if I kiss you one last time?”
I might, was my first thought, and maybe I said that out loud, too, because she smiled.
Kissing a dead body - even though she was alive for a few hours - was probably against the law, the morals, every church out there, and life and even against Death itself. But my whole body was quivering with anticipation and Suzy was leering under her long eyelashes, and her collarbones were showing through the unbuttoned collar of her (my) shirt - I didn’t stand a chance against her.
Her lips tasted like river water, death - and maybe love was there too, not much, but enough. Suzy’s hands found their way under my shirt, and my gloved hands trembled over the skin of her neck. It wasn’t like kissing 15 year old Suzy - it felt hungrier, less shallow, more rushed, more violent, needy as we pushed and pulled each other in frenzy. There was shoving and clenching and sharp breathing, and no breathing at all, until I was suffocating, no air in my lungs, white spots exploding behind my closed eyelids like the fireworks we used to lit up on summer nights. She didn’t stop, I didn’t stop her. For as long as we could we resisted being apart, as if time and life and Death could be frozen as long as our bodies were pressed together - until our lips got too swollen and our bodies were feverish and we were sitting down on the dirty concrete looking at the dark, empty sky. Suzy was my first kiss, I was her last.
There were no stars on the ceiling of the morgue either, so I brought the ones from my room with us. The fake starry sky didn’t glow anymore, but she didn’t care, making up constellations from the mortuary table, pointing at them with bony fingers, her laugh echoing creepily throughout the room, and if the other boys were alive they would be staring too. But they were dead, dead like Suzy.
“Thank you for the stars,” was the last thing she said.
(“I love you.” And that was the forty-seventh time. Suzy threw away her cigarette, stepping on it with the tip of her ballerina flats, looking up at the dark, stormy sky, the saddest smile I had ever seen tinting her face. “Give me stars and I’ll believe you, Coffin Boy.”)
Forty-ninth.
I took off my gloves. Suzy smiled one last time, and her eyes were a little less empty, and there was light under her skin instead of terrifying darkness.
(What if you didn’t have to be dead?)
The other boys - whose names I never really cared to remember - were shipped off in big black hearses to be buried far away where people maybe cried for them. There weren’t any tears for Little Suzy, though. Among the parade of black vultures, her old platonic lovers gathered around her casket to see the decay of the girl that ruined their lives and took away their first loves (and sometimes their sanity) only to throw them into a pile of garbage. It was a silent agreement that we - the boys from six years before - would miss her more. We would miss her charm, her legs, her hair, her smell, her voice, like we did, albeit in secret, for the last few years, because there was no one like Little Suzy. There was no more real love for her either, not from them, but fascination and curiosity and maybe hate and disgust, and those things would never really fade. First loves are like that. Suzy was like that.
At noon, she was ready to be buried.
I opened her casket in the empty foyer of my house - people had gone, leaving behind the lingering taste of despair it always filled my house after a funeral. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful and beautiful and very much correctly embalmed (“She looks so alive, it’s spooky,” they had muttered in between comments on how everyone knew she was going to end up dead somehow).
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I whispered, tugging on the sleeve of her dress.
Suzy’s eyes popped open and they reflected the sunlight that gave the room golden shadows - it was a terribly beautiful day, and the house didn’t look as ominous as usual. Suzy stretched her arms and yawned, as if she was waking up from a nap - of course, she would feel comfortable enough inside a casket to sleep in it.
(It wasn’t a mutual feeling, but I’d do it if she was there.)
She pulled on my arms, and I crawled inside the casket, our bodies now too tall to fit together, limbs tangling while the wood crackled dangerously.
“I’m alive,” her voice was hesitant, small, her eyes watching the dust dance and glimmer in the patch of light near the casket. I knew Suzy enough to know she was grateful, that she was happy, genuinely happy.
I held her closer, and she petted my hair lovingly. Maybe she didn’t love me the same way I loved her, maybe Suzy would never do, but I didn’t mind - not at that moment. I let my head rest on her chest, listening to her heart beat furiously inside her chest, counting each and every one of them, savoring the fact she was alive and breathing and there.
“You’re alive, Suzy.”
And that day, in a house full of coffins and bodies and Death, in the small town near the river that killed my first love and brought her back to me, something occurred that is not, was not and should never be considered an ending. For endings, as it is known, are where we begin.
(the last sentence was taken directly from Pushing Daisies, with slight modifications. this was for mi, my otp soulmate.)
oneshot, 4132 words, PG-13
dark fluff (?) and bittersweet angst
myungzy
A/N: this is a pushing daisies/six feet under alternative universe with a dash of the virgin suicides. thank you hansung for the help with my failed grammar. and here i am killing suzy again. apologies.
my boy builds coffins for better or worse
some say it's a blessing, some say it's a curse
(he’s made one for himself and one for me, too)
Three boys were inside the car but they didn’t last long. But Bae Sue Ji - (“It’s Suzy. Stop calling me by that awful name.”) - was alive when the car filled with muddy water, and she probably felt it burning up her lungs as they failed to cling to every bit of oxygen they could. And then she was eerie and dead, her pale slightly-green skin contrasted with the mortuary table in a certain cruel way.
(Death is cruel.)
She looked delicate, thin, elegant and papery - like she always had been - and as I took her in, her ripped jeans, the golden shirt, the smear of red on her lips, it hurt in every way it could. But she came back, after all.
My mother used to paint the rooms bright colors to keep the darkness out (“It stains your soul black, this business.”) and when she pushed me into Suzy’s room against my will (“She doesn’t have siblings, be a nice neighbor to little Sue Ji”, and I was six then) it was like walking into a haven for all things good. It was so bright I was sure the darkness would never find its way there, and so I stayed. But it did, eventually - it always does.
Little Suzy and I used to play together among rows and rows of beautifully carved coffins, and it was all too morbid but kids rarely notice things like death. And then we grew up, and then - and then she evaporated in thin air, she was gone, and I was left behind with a bunch of obnoxious feelings and questions, Death and its black coffins.
When I woke her up that night, I didn’t expect anything - no answers, no memories, and no explanations. Despite persistent questions regarding her life and death that piled in my brain, I woke her up because Suzy had always exerted a certain fascination over me I could never completely fathom - alluring Little Suzy was the one thing I couldn’t really let go.
She wriggled on the table and inhaled desperately, groaning rather painfully as her body awakened, stiff limbs twitching, fists clenching and unclenching, back arching in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.
“Jesus-“ she cried, coughing up dirty river water.
I didn’t offer any help, like it was required of me.
Suzy calmed down on her own, curled up on the table like a terrified child - which triggered some of my darkest memories of her - until she finally sat up, slowly, her long legs untangling, all pale and bruised, going for miles till I didn’t know where to look anymore. Her eyes caught the silhouette of the three other dead bodies in the room, and the look that crossed her face wasn’t hurt or scared. It said assholes.
They know - the dead ones - that they’re dead. I never had to explain a thing. The living are the ones that hope for answers, mostly. So it wasn’t a surprise to me when the first thing she said was, and in my mind I could see fifteen year old Suzy lighting a cigarette; “I should’ve walked” with a completely unfazed expression on her face.
She leaned forward to get a closer look of a pair of scalpels, her dirty damp hair failing all over herself like waves. Suzy had been fond of sharp objects, and I pretended it was a normal thing, but the way her fingers held the metallic blades made my face heat up.
“I’m not looking forward to those.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“Reassuring, undertaker.”
Her voice bordered flirty, making me feel things I haven’t felt for a long time. The blood was already rushing through my body in a violent pace and I had to occupy my eyes with the clock, or the occasional drip of the sink’s faucet.
“Come on, I’ll show you the bathroom,” I said when a dull, contrived silence settled in between us.
I preferred to walk ahead of her, but the steps we took were small and her hands pulled on my shirt every now and then for balance. Sometimes they would brush against my skin and it felt like my body was ablaze, in a horribly pleasant way.
I should have washed her head and stitched her bruises on the silvery table, but the thought was pushed away and cornered somewhere in my brain by much less civil thoughts - I kept telling myself she was a girl, the girl - the first love, the only love, maybe, possibly, definitely - and she deserved one last bath, with shampoo that smelled like fruit.
Upstairs, the house was quiet. Our basement was often filled with bodies, but the hallways of my family house were empty. Our business was Death, and Death seemed to enjoy our company far too much. I rushed her through corridors that smelled like old people, embalming fluids and kimchi. They were full of doors leading to colorful rooms that didn’t reflect our lifestyle at all.
Then we were locked up in my bathroom - the same one Suzy used to brush her teeth in whenever she woke up in my bed - and she settled in the bathtub as I sat down on the cold floor. The water was too hot, the glass cuts on her arms were stinging and I couldn’t really breathe because her clothes were forgotten somewhere and her skin was all I could see.
“Can you wash my hair?”
No.
“Can’t you wash it yourself?”
But it was a stupid thing to say because I couldn’t stop staring; her bra straps were too loose, and the wet candy-colored piece of clothing pulled me closer until I had the bottle of shampoo next to me and foam on my rubber gloves.
Suzy’s hums and steam eventually filled the bathroom, and the water got stale as the minutes rolled by, turning white and dull. Her hair was clean and I sat with my back against the damp tiles as she stared at me like she was seeing me for the first time.
It got silent again, the kind of quietness that seems to happen between people after unnecessary but deliberate touching - like pulling her hair a tad stronger, or scrapping the nape of her neck with my fingers to feel her shiver.
“Do I really need to die?”
You shouldn’t have to.
“Yes.”
“Well, that sucks for me,” she hissed, standing up and stepping outside the tub with a flair of her pretty hips and an annoyed expression on her face.
She stomped out of the bathroom rather ungracefully, slipping and dripping as she went and leaving the heavy scent of orange shampoo behind her - as well as a disturbing pang on my chest I chose to ignore.
When I left the bathroom, Suzy was tucked inside a robe - mine, of course, it was blue and it had One Piece characters on it and it was embarrassing - like she had always belonged to my room, or my life, or me and once, yes, she did.
As I sutured her deeper cuts I became alarmingly aware of things I didn’t remember, or things I couldn’t ignore so easily - like the beauty mark on her left thigh, or how she was ticklish over her hipbone and the tattoo that read l’amour toujours. I didn’t have any idea what it meant.
“I’m glad you’re my undertaker, Coffin Boy.”
Oh.
Coffin Boy was my unflattering superhero name when we were kids - Suzy came up with it, of course. I was holding one of the ends of her mother’s coffin at the funeral, and that was the reason behind the name - that, and of course, my family’s business. I held her hand for the first time that day, even though Suzy didn’t shed any tears like it was expected of her nine year old self. Years later we would spend the nights at my house, smoking cigarettes in the foyer full of caskets - and sometimes we would sleep in them, our skin against the white valance, listening to each other’s heartbeats as if they were mocking Death itself. We weren’t afraid of it at all. Well, Suzy wasn’t.
I kissed her in one of those nights, and it was my first kiss - but not hers. Little Suzy, fifteen years old, wasn’t as little anymore. She was already heartbreak and teen angst in her sunny dresses and flip-flops. I was probably more in love than she was - no, I’m certain I was. Who wasn’t in love with Suzy?
“I’m not Coffin Boy anymore-“
“I don’t want to look dead, I want to look pretty,” Suzy ignored me (like she so often did when she was still alive), and her head was on my shoulder and I was sure, for a second or so, that I was developing tachycardia. Her skin was starting to feel warm again, I could feel it heating up my body; or maybe it wasn’t Suzy’s skin at all. I wanted to touch her until she was dead and cold again - but her fingers were brushing against my thigh and I froze awkwardly on my spot on the bed, my eyes at the ceiling full of the remains of plastic stars that used to glow in the dark when I was younger. “No, maybe -I want to look the way I am.”
“Still pretty.“
Bae Suzy was always terribly different in a broken sort of way; and way, way too beautiful, carelessly beautiful. Bony knees and skinny fingers and long hair and melancholic eyes - and always like a school girl pretending to be a grown up with her foul attitude and flirty eyes causing havoc and hips, hips, hips. It was unsettling.
School girls shouldn’t have been on my mind at all given the fact I was 21, but Suzy-
Suzy.
The words were barely out of my mouth and my mind was just a mess of unpoised images again, the stars and planets above us seemed to be part of a whole different life… and Suzy, Suzy, Suzy, she didn’t even give me time to breathe because she was on my lap, her weight over my legs, and it was all too intimate to feel comfortable. My hands were firmly tucked in my pockets, and I was struggling to breathe.
“I’m sorry I left you, Myungsoo.”
I tried very hard to understand the events that led to Suzy’s disappearance - I thought about her more than I’d like to admit after she was gone. The postcard she left me was still stuck behind my bed post (“I’m sorry.”), the bottles of perfume and the photographs and her favorite shirt, they were packed somewhere in my closet and I couldn’t really get rid of them. She killed herself in the river, we will never find a body to bury - that’s what they had said at the time. And yet there she was, six years later, found dead in the same river from years ago.
I still don’t know what was more heart wrenching - realizing she had left me behind in a house full of Death’s remains, or unzipping the body bag for hers.
“I don’t need an apology, it’s fine,” my voice came out much raspier than I would have liked. I sounded angry and I wasn’t. I was numb to those feelings already.
“It hurt you,” she continued, and her fingers touched my cheek. I couldn’t remember exactly the last time she touched me with such tenderness - or if she ever did. It wasn’t like Suzy. She was razor blades; I was the skin being hurt by them. “I couldn’t stand it anymore - I didn’t belong, I didn’t have anyone. But you, you had something here - your family and-”
You had me, I thought, but the words never came out.
“I missed you,” I blurted instead, meekly.
Maybe I never fell out of love with her; maybe the darkness just found its way under my skin after she was gone (like it found its way under her bedroom door years ago) - and because I was stuck in the dark, I never left it behind. I became the dark, the undertaker, the boy with the coffins; she became the ghost in the back of my mind.
“I missed you, too.”
Suzy smiled her perfectly coy smile that used to throw boys out of their ways for her. I never liked that smile because it was almost never directed at me - and because it was ever so often used to drag boys into her pink bedroom (they called it a very different name in secretive whispers across the school halls), like a mermaid that drags men into the ocean with their sweet songs and promises of love, only to kill them later. She reserved the blithe ones for me.
“Can we go to the Watcher, for old time’s sake?”
The Watcher was how we called the rooftop of my house since we were eight; a square space my family never really cared for (the basement was far more profitable), but our hideout for years. Suzy’s hideout more than mine, I could often find her there bundled in duvets from my own bed, drinking coffee from my favorite mug, reading one of my mangas. I never went back there again after she was gone.
So when we stepped outside - Suzy wearing one of my plait t-shirts that looked dangerously short on her (she had grown tall over the years, almost as tall as me) - it felt like we went back in time. The sky was still pitch black, starless, and the air felt sultry, sticky, like it usually does during high summer.
I never let them leave the morgue, the dead ones. It was against the rules - my rules, or Death’s rules, I wasn’t sure anymore. I understood why. Suzy looked undeniably alive, and I didn’t want to let her go again.
“Remember when I jumped?” she laughed, drumming her fingers on the brick rail, creating an imaginary rhythm to her words.
“You thought you could fly,” I nodded, watching her closely. “I never laughed so much in my entire life.”
“You were such a dick, Myungsoo.”
Suzy was eleven when she decided she was going to fly. I told her it was impossible, she told me she was absolutely certain she could do it. Of course she ended up breaking her arm in three places and was the school topic for the whole month - the girl who thought she could fly, Bae Sue Ji. The memory made me smile - but I turned my face away from her, because smiling at Suzy was a sign of weakness.
“Why did you leave?” (Me.)
She let go a deep sigh, as she had been waiting for that question to come up sooner or later. I didn’t intend to ask at first, I didn’t want the knowledge to haunt me later, I just wanted to see her, to touch her, to feel her breathing one last time because she was fascinating, Suzy, the girl I used to love - and I thought I was going to grow up without it, without her, until I got so old I had to make a coffin for myself and throw Suzy’s memories away - or bury them with me. I had accepted that, partly, maybe, probably.
(I hadn’t at all.)
“I told you,” her fingers danced on the rail. “I needed to go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere else,” I touched the tips of her hair, and it was a rather involuntary action, a side effect of our years as friends. “Away from here. I’m sorry I never let you know. I couldn’t afford long distance calls, I couldn’t afford anything, I guess.”
“I would have gone with you,” I admitted gruffly. “You were-“
The princess from the fairy tales I told to dead children before putting them to sleep for an eternity, sharp edges that left me behind bleeding, the colors on the walls of my house, the haggard girl crying on my doorstep, the nails digging in my skin, the whispers behind closed doors, the caskets, the dancing, the darkness under my skin, shelter, friend, best friend, love.
“Can I confess something, since I’m dead?” she exclaimed, her words coming out strangled, choked. Her dancing fingers found the seam of my shirt and she pulled me closer until I felt her inhale through the cotton fabric. I couldn’t breathe again, because Suzy felt like Suzy from six years before, but more. “I regret going away. I had to, but it didn’t make me happy. The world isn’t that great, you know - it’s cold.”
Dead people regret, and that’s why they wake up in my basement.
“I thought I was going to make it,” she scoffed, closing her eyes. “But I was coming back. I didn’t have a place to live. I didn’t have money, I just had - I thought it was going to be easy. I thought somebody would find me there. I guess I was happier here.”
Where you happier with me?
“I have something to confess, too.”
Forty-eight were the times I told Suzy I loved her and waited for an answer - but I was often left with tartly laughter, or silence, or the kind of touches that would make me shut up for good. Little Suzy was an empty black hole, while I was full of need and want and love.
She looked up at me with a blank face, her chin on my chest, waiting. The immense emptiness behind her pupils was there, reflecting my face and my hollow expression. Suzy would close her eyes in a few hours, and she would lay her head on a pillow, and she would sleep until her body - carefully embalmed by me -rotted and turned to ashes, and slowly everyone would forget about the girl who thought she could fly, enticing Suzy, hips and short shorts and light skin like white porcelain from the Joseon dinasty.
“I sold your book collection.”
(I couldn’t make that the forty-ninth time.)
Suzy looked surprised for half a second, but her face wrinkled into a smile, and she tugged on my clothes a little harder, and we were so close I thought I was going to sink into her soul. But she didn’t say anything, no snarky remarks, and no dry retorts - instead, she stared, for the longest time, like I used to stare at her when she wasn’t looking. Bony fingers touched my face as her smile faded, and Suzy looked empty again.
“Perfect Coffin Boy Myungsoo,” she whispered under her breath, and the tip of her fingers brushed my eyelashes softly. “You were always so good. I think I might have been in love with you at some point. How did I turn out so fucked up?”
How did I end up talking to corpses?
How did you end up dead?
When did you love me?
Why is it past tense?
Why-
“Will I die again if I kiss you one last time?”
I might, was my first thought, and maybe I said that out loud, too, because she smiled.
Kissing a dead body - even though she was alive for a few hours - was probably against the law, the morals, every church out there, and life and even against Death itself. But my whole body was quivering with anticipation and Suzy was leering under her long eyelashes, and her collarbones were showing through the unbuttoned collar of her (my) shirt - I didn’t stand a chance against her.
Her lips tasted like river water, death - and maybe love was there too, not much, but enough. Suzy’s hands found their way under my shirt, and my gloved hands trembled over the skin of her neck. It wasn’t like kissing 15 year old Suzy - it felt hungrier, less shallow, more rushed, more violent, needy as we pushed and pulled each other in frenzy. There was shoving and clenching and sharp breathing, and no breathing at all, until I was suffocating, no air in my lungs, white spots exploding behind my closed eyelids like the fireworks we used to lit up on summer nights. She didn’t stop, I didn’t stop her. For as long as we could we resisted being apart, as if time and life and Death could be frozen as long as our bodies were pressed together - until our lips got too swollen and our bodies were feverish and we were sitting down on the dirty concrete looking at the dark, empty sky. Suzy was my first kiss, I was her last.
There were no stars on the ceiling of the morgue either, so I brought the ones from my room with us. The fake starry sky didn’t glow anymore, but she didn’t care, making up constellations from the mortuary table, pointing at them with bony fingers, her laugh echoing creepily throughout the room, and if the other boys were alive they would be staring too. But they were dead, dead like Suzy.
“Thank you for the stars,” was the last thing she said.
(“I love you.” And that was the forty-seventh time. Suzy threw away her cigarette, stepping on it with the tip of her ballerina flats, looking up at the dark, stormy sky, the saddest smile I had ever seen tinting her face. “Give me stars and I’ll believe you, Coffin Boy.”)
Forty-ninth.
I took off my gloves. Suzy smiled one last time, and her eyes were a little less empty, and there was light under her skin instead of terrifying darkness.
(What if you didn’t have to be dead?)
The other boys - whose names I never really cared to remember - were shipped off in big black hearses to be buried far away where people maybe cried for them. There weren’t any tears for Little Suzy, though. Among the parade of black vultures, her old platonic lovers gathered around her casket to see the decay of the girl that ruined their lives and took away their first loves (and sometimes their sanity) only to throw them into a pile of garbage. It was a silent agreement that we - the boys from six years before - would miss her more. We would miss her charm, her legs, her hair, her smell, her voice, like we did, albeit in secret, for the last few years, because there was no one like Little Suzy. There was no more real love for her either, not from them, but fascination and curiosity and maybe hate and disgust, and those things would never really fade. First loves are like that. Suzy was like that.
At noon, she was ready to be buried.
I opened her casket in the empty foyer of my house - people had gone, leaving behind the lingering taste of despair it always filled my house after a funeral. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful and beautiful and very much correctly embalmed (“She looks so alive, it’s spooky,” they had muttered in between comments on how everyone knew she was going to end up dead somehow).
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I whispered, tugging on the sleeve of her dress.
Suzy’s eyes popped open and they reflected the sunlight that gave the room golden shadows - it was a terribly beautiful day, and the house didn’t look as ominous as usual. Suzy stretched her arms and yawned, as if she was waking up from a nap - of course, she would feel comfortable enough inside a casket to sleep in it.
(It wasn’t a mutual feeling, but I’d do it if she was there.)
She pulled on my arms, and I crawled inside the casket, our bodies now too tall to fit together, limbs tangling while the wood crackled dangerously.
“I’m alive,” her voice was hesitant, small, her eyes watching the dust dance and glimmer in the patch of light near the casket. I knew Suzy enough to know she was grateful, that she was happy, genuinely happy.
I held her closer, and she petted my hair lovingly. Maybe she didn’t love me the same way I loved her, maybe Suzy would never do, but I didn’t mind - not at that moment. I let my head rest on her chest, listening to her heart beat furiously inside her chest, counting each and every one of them, savoring the fact she was alive and breathing and there.
“You’re alive, Suzy.”
And that day, in a house full of coffins and bodies and Death, in the small town near the river that killed my first love and brought her back to me, something occurred that is not, was not and should never be considered an ending. For endings, as it is known, are where we begin.
(the last sentence was taken directly from Pushing Daisies, with slight modifications. this was for mi, my otp soulmate.)