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I woke up the worst kind of alone.
The alarm went off, same as usual. My arm was across her as I woke up, my befuddled mind thinking Wow, guess that wasn’t just a dream. I managed to reach over and hit snooze in order to cuddle up, just the way we used to before getting up to start our day, just a few minutes with each other, before I realized something was very wrong.
What I’d woken up with wasn’t a living, breathing woman.
I bellowed an inarticulate cry of panic and scrambled backwards out of bed, stumbling over the blankets on my way out of bed, but also ripping them off what was in bed with me.
Once I was free of their entangling grasp, I looked at what was there on the bed: a dried, desiccated corpse, long dead, eyes shrunken in, skin sagging, pitted. Intact as far as I could tell, but dead for years. Only the honey-blonde hair was unchanged, still the young, wavy style it had been the previous evening.
I wasn’t going to pretend I understood, but it was clear I had to do something, and once I got over my initial panic, I knew who to call.
“Hello, Larry!”
“Mark, what are you calling about at such an early hour? You know I don’t get to the office before eight-thirty!”
“Yes, Larry, but this is different, and I need your help now. I woke up with a corpse in my bed this morning!”
“Mark, I must not be awake yet. I could have sworn you just told me you woke up with a corpse in your bed, and I know that can’t be true!” I started to tell him it was true, and he talked over me, “I know it can’t be true because you wouldn’t have called a securities lawyer over a criminal matter that didn’t happen. Are you understanding me, Mark?”
“I didn’t kill her, Larry!”
“Of course you didn’t, Mark, because I must have misunderstood what you were saying. You couldn’t have told me you woke up with a corpse in your bed because you didn’t, and you wouldn’t be calling me if you had.”
“Larry, you’re the only lawyer I know that I can call at this hour of the morning! Help me, here!”
“Mark, if such a thing did happen, the only advice I could give you would be to call law enforcement right away and not to say anything – and I mean nothing at all, no matter how innocent, until you can get a lawyer who knows what they’re doing in these sorts of cases. Cops will lie and will try to set you up. I’d recommend Morris Silver, if he can take you. If not, he’ll know someone good who can”
And then he hung up.
Well, shit.
Copyright 2019 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved
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