The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [40]
“Get back in your grave, and cover yourself with stones,” said Awa, the corpse silently obeying her but Omorose’s shade letting off a high whining sound. Once Omorose’s corpse had blanketed itself with rocks and lay facing the gap in the wall, Awa addressed her old mistress: “Omorose, I’m going to let you back into your body now but I can’t let you attack me. So don’t move or I’ll just push you out again, alright?”
Awa focused and Omorose jumped into her old skin. “ Let me back into my body? You dirty, sneaking animal ! It’s mine!”
“You’re dead.” Awa swallowed.
“Damn right! And you think that gives you the right to rape me? To make me lick you, you horrible fat ape?”
“No, I didn’t know, no, I love—”
“Why don’t you lick me, girl, why don’t you lick my rotten slit if you’re so keen on me?”
“Alright,” said Awa, her composure falling away like the bones of a skeleton with a cracked skull. She dropped forward on her knees and began pulling the stones away from the barrow to get at Omorose. “Alright, I’m sorry, I’ve been selfish, I didn’t think, and when I offered before you told me not to and—”
“I didn’t tell you anything!” Omorose screeched, the stones covering her rattling like Awa’s teeth as she shifted in her grave. “And stay the hell away from me, you nasty beast! Don’t you dare touch me again, don’t you dare!”
“I thought it was you,” Awa pleaded. “I did, I thought it was you, I thought I’d brought you back and—”
“I loved you? I wanted to fuck you?” Omorose’s blackened lips pulled back to reveal mealy green gums. “I’d sooner have our tutor touch me than have a mud-black little monkey clinging—”
“What’s wrong with you?!” Awa screamed at her. “Why are you always so mean?! You weren’t even in your body so why do you care? Why do you care if I’m happy for one night in a thousand?!”
“My body,” said Omorose, her shift to calm, rational discourse even more frustrating to Awa than her shouting accusations. “Mine. I might not have been in it but I certainly knew what you’d been up to as soon as I got back. My flesh remembers, that little bit I left behind remembers, I remember. My body, not yours. Ape.”
“You weren’t.” Awa gulped, timing her words to fit between the sobs. “I didn’t know, and you weren’t using—”
“So if you’re asleep and the old man wants to give you a poke that’s alright so long as you don’t wake up? They kill rapists where I come from, ape, they chop them up and burn them.”
“No,” said Awa. “No, I’m not—”
“This is why he killed me,” Omorose said sadly. “You got me killed because you’re so nasty.”
“What? No—”
“Yes you did. You’re just like him, that’s why. He knew you were just like him, a pathetic fat bitch who can’t have what she wants unless she steals it, who has to open graves to find a girl who will suffer her kiss. You’re just like him, you—”
“No!” Awa shrieked, wrenching Omorose out of her corpse and snatching up stones, walling in the cadaver. “No no no!”
When the tomb was resealed Awa wiped her tears away with gritty fingers and gathered her blankets. Turning in the doorway, she yelled at the crypt, “You stay in there until you behave!”
The necromancer did not protest when she dumped her belongings in front of his hearth and informed him she would be staying. The concubine began saying something vile but Awa ran out before she could finish, her tutor chuckling in his chair. Awa paced the perimeter of the mountaintop, her hoof kicking pebbles over the edge, her ragged sniffling unheard by all but the dead.
“Awa.” She heard him behind her in the darkness, and she paused as the bandit chief approached. “Is everything alright?”
She turned and looked miserably at the bones of the man who had brought her there, who had brought all of them there, and then she