Free Remember Why You Fear Me by Robert Shearman

point out he wasn’t back because of her at all but a bureaucratic quirk. “Thank God you came back.” And that there was no God to thank, and if there had been there wouldn’t have been the bureaucratic quirk in the first place. They made love that first night, and for several nights afterwards, something they hadn’t done much even when he’d been alive. And it was surprisingly nice, but not so nice that he minded when they sunk back into their usual platonic domesticity. Within a week he was lying in bed next to her, blocking out the snoring with ear plugs. And in the dead of night, when all was still, he could almost believe that he’d never died and been to Hell at all.
    At work, however, they weren’t so accommodating. For old time’s sake, the boss generously gave Martin ten minutes out of his hectic schedule. “And it is hectic at the moment!” he told Martin. “Busy, busy, busy! Well, I needn’t tell you. You know what this job’s like, you’ve lived it!” Martin was told that they would
love
to take him back, they
really
would, but they just
couldn’t
, not in the present climate. “You can hardly expect to take a leave of absence that long, without any warning, and expect your job waiting when you get back.” And besides, the boss admitted when pressed, not everyone felt very comfortable working alongside corpses. Not the boss himself, of course. But even Martin must admit, being one himself, there was something funny about the way they looked. Whereas once he’d been respected for being so reliable, so solid—now, in a very real sense, he wasn’t solid anymore.
    See the dead face on, and you could just about pretend they were normal—that they were living and breathing like all right-minded people. But turn your head to the side and you could see the soul, that all of this skin and bone and individuality was just a façade. It wasn’t a thing anyone liked to be reminded of. And it meant that the dead were instantly recognisable. By and large the living would ignore them, some would glare at them with obvious hostility; there were even incidents of target beatings by gangs, but outbreaks of violence became rarer when it was realized you couldn’t do anything to kill them. Within weeks the worst that a dead man walking the streets might expect was to be spat at.
    Once upon a time, if you’d wanted to separate a race from the rest of society, to make a people stand out and be judged, you’d bring out the yellow badges, you’d start shaving heads. Woofie’s masters had done it. But no one had to isolate the dead; with their souls flapping about for all to see, they’d done it to themselves. And the worst part of it was that they felt ashamed of each other too. A dead man seeing another dead man would turn his eyes in the same way as a living man would; once in a while there might pass a look of sympathy, of understanding, but they’d hurry on, not daring to talk to each other, not daring to reach out and say ‘I am one of you’. As if for fear that the vacancy in their eyes, the deadness that had so much more to do with the heart no longer beating and the lungs no longer filling, might be what you looked like too.
    Moira didn’t like to mention to Martin the fact that he was very nearly two-dimensional. But even her discretion used to irritate him. She’d try to ignore it at first, then to make it go away. She’d make him his favourite meals, fried and fatty, and she’d say it was because she loved him, that she’d missed cooking for him, that she just wanted him to be happy. But he saw the truth.
    “You’re trying to fatten me up!” he said.
    Moira blushed, and admitted that she thought he could do with a little padding out, his body might lose some of its
flatness
, if only if . . .
    “But the food doesn’t go anywhere. I eat it, then it vanishes. It doesn’t stay in the stomach, I don’t have a stomach. For God’s sake, I can’t even shit.”
    Moira cried, and said