Eudora Bixby is dead, but there is a sneeze rudely pacing the inside of her nose. Perhaps it is doing the minuet. Or a waltz. Or a particularly jaunty tango. Eudora reminds herself she is dead and twists her nose into a lumpy button. The river beneath her is ripe with bacteria, but corpses aren't picky, she assumes.

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To hell with assumptions. Eudora rolls onto her stomach with the grace of a drunken emu and flaps her little arms and legs. She would like to call this strange little dance of hers swimming.

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Someone is on the pier, watching her. A boy. His lips are moving but speak only the chaotic sounds of the river water sloshing across her palms.

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"Don't talk to me, can't you see I'm dead?" Eudora says, peeling a strand of hair off her lips. Bitter. The taste of the river.

 

The boy on the pier laughs. A crooked grin. His eyes are the same color as the murky river, something dark.

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"I beg to disagree," he says, "Bodies don't talk. That's the whole point of 'em."  

Eudora swallows air like a southern housewife does whiskey and disappears beneath the surface of the river. Quiet.

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"Okay, okay," the boy says to the patch of grayish water where Eudora had been, "I got it. You're dead."

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Gasp. Cough. Spit. Eudora is back, and it takes her twenty-seven minutes to reach the shore. She sticks out her hand to the boy because curtsies are dumb and stupid.

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"Eudora," she says, eyes sharp.

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"Bless you."

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"It's my name." Spitting out the words through clenched teeth, Eudora is too busy picking slime or seaweed out of her hair to care for conversation.

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"That's an ugly name," the boy says anyway.

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"Well," scoffs Eudora.

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"You look more like a Stella," the boy says, "I had a pet rat named Stella. She loved the water."

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"I hate the water."

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"Then why were you going for a swim in the Hudson?"

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"I hate my sister more." 

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"You always this talkative?”

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"Sorry," Eudora mutters, arranging her hair into three raven plaits, watching him pick the kelp off his shoe.

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"Don't worry about it," the boy kicks a rock into the water. It skips, one, two, three, drowns. "So I take it you're not going back to your sister tonight?' 

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"Oh, she probably hasn’t noticed I'm dead yet," Eudora flicks a braid over her shoulder. The air is slimy and stained with salt. Eudora realizes she is quite famished, and would perhaps kill for a ginger beer, a salty sour pickle, and an obscene amount of bacon. Corpses aren’t inclined to sour pickles and cured meats and carbonated beverages, she assumes. But to hell with assumptions.

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