🌹’s Reviews > Upright Beasts > Status Update

“But Clover,” I say, “even when we die, we never truly go away.”
I don’t mean that hogwash about friends and family living on in our memories. I mean that creatures like Clover and me, those with the star-fallen flesh inside us, are not restrained by these bodies.

…I find the shovel and begin to dig a pit. My fingers blister on the wooden handle. My legs ache. I push the parts of your murdered mother into the pit one by one. I get the gasoline that we foraged from the neighbors’ charred car. It spills on my hands, burning the blisters. I’m too weak to even cry. I shuffle back to the house, the smoke of your mother in my clothes.

It was one of those muggy days where the sun licked you all over like a stray dog. The kind of day that wore on you. All you wanted was some lemonade, but the little boys and girls were inside with the TV and AC, and the paper cups were being chewed apart by angry rats.

Autumn was spreading with crackling orange and red leaves, like the path of a teenage pyromaniac.