matchbook

he dead girls go to Mars. They live—they exist—in bungalows and cottages. They never had things like that on earth, never even said the words bungalow or cottage, not when they were alive. They taste the syllables of each on their unfrozen tongues: bungalow, bungalow, cottage.

They have brooms for sweeping dust from their cottages. The dust is red. The brooms are the color of brooms. The dead girls hold them in their hands. They never mind splinters in their dead fingertips. They brush the bristles across the floor. Dust is always getting in; dust is always being brushed out. The dead girls have a little song they hum while they sweep the dust away. They don’t remember if it is a song they knew from earth or if it is a new song, a Martian song, made just for them like the cottages and bungalows and drifty bristled brooms.

There are little gardens on Mars for the dead girls, with Martian plants and Martian flowers. They grow without help, without a care in the world. The dead girls admire their Martian gardens from their doorways, how pretty the flowers, how alien and fine.

It is a new world, red and round and perfect.

The dead girls wave to each other from the doorways of their bungalows. The dead girls smile with their whole mouths. They watch an all-new sunrise in the mornings, they watch two perfect moons in the sky.

Twice as many as we had before, they say.

Their brooms rustle along their bungalow floors.

The dead girls don’t miss the places where they died. They don’t think of home or family or how it felt to breathe for the last time,  how sweet was the air on earth, how sweet was the air at all. They don’t think of coldness or darkness or nothingness or pie. The dead girls never think of pie, not their favorite slices from when they were alive, not with ice cream puddling on the plate beside it. Not the sound of a fork clattering against an empty plate.

The dead girls are dead and oh-so-happy. The dead girls are on Mars. There are new bungalows and new dead girls popping up out of the red dust every day.

Hello, hello, hello, the dead girls call to each other.

Everything is perfect and red. Everything is better than it was before. Their brooms go swish swish swish on bungalow floors. The dead girls love their cottages and bungalows. The dead girls love Mars.