Entropy
She had dreamt of funerals before, danced through rows of gravestones concocted by her subconscious at least a dozen times, but these dreams had never actually done the reality justice. And yes, she had attended a few over the years; she had been in this very cemetery before, laying her sister to rest. Something about this one just felt off, though. Maybe it was standing next to that four year old headstone, or the fact that she was burying her father today, or maybe it had to do with those five grams of shrooms she had ingested two hours ago. Whatever it was, she no longer wanted to be here.
Not that she had wanted to attend in the first place. Her sister’s death had been hard enough, followed too closely by her mother’s. Placing her father next to the two of them, she couldn’t help but acknowledge that she was alone. That feeling of off-ness dove deeper the more she stared at the headstone.
Its death date was wrong. Instead of reading “7/27/2016” the way it should, “11/17/2014” was inscribed on the gravestone. Cocking her head to the side, she studied the granite, trying to remember where she had seen that date before. She kept getting distracted by the billowing mist swirling about the ground. It was a clichéd image, the kind seen in B horror movies, of fog blowing in on a graveyard. When thunder cracked behind her, what was left of the rational side of brain recognized the hallucination for what it was.
“It’s the day mom died,” a voice said from behind her, a voice she hadn’t heard in four years, a voice that killed any lingering sobriety. Even though she knew she was hallucinating, hearing her sister speak sent a genuine tremor up her spine. “How ya been, Jawbone?”
“Whit-Whitney?” Samantha asked, turning around slowly to stare at what was clearly a ghost. She had never cared for that stupid nickname, but it was something only her sister would have ever called her.
“More or less,” the ghost of Whitney responded, staring back at the frightened and tripping girl.
“Why is mom’s death date on dad’s tombstone?” Sam’s voice was shaking and tears had begun their descent down her cheeks, but for the moment she had enough control to ask.
“Because that was when he actually died.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” She raked her fingers through her brunette hair, her shroom-inebriated mind taking longer to fully grasp what her dead sister was saying. “Wait…you don’t mean…?”
“That dad literally stopped living in any meaningful sense of the word when mom died? That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“H-How-How is that possible?”
“Look at my headstone,” Whitney answered, ignoring the question entirely. So Samantha looked.
The headstone should have read “04/08/1986 – 05/07/2012”. Whitney’s life was reduced to nothing more than a dash between birth and death dates, as if everything that a person was and had been could be reduced to a placeholder. Just like Sam’s father, though, the death date was wrong. It instead read “06/12/2009”.
“You stopped living three years before you…?” Samantha refused to finish that thought, refused to accept what had happened to her sister, even standing in front of her ghost.
“Before I overdosed?” Whitney had no such compunctions about her death. “Yeah, I did.”
“Why?”
“That’s the day you left.”
The accusation wasn’t spoken in Whitney’s voice, nor was it much of an accusation. It sounded like just a statement of fact to Samantha, like it made perfect sense that her leaving would be the catalyst that led to that fatal OD. She had thought it often enough, so why not let it actually be true.
“I’m sorry,” she finally whispered, looking down at the fresh dirt on her father’s grave. “I’m so sorry.”
“You literally have nothing to apologize for,” Whitney responded again in her voice, staring down at her kneeling sister. She didn’t blink until Sam finally looked back up, her green eyes meeting the milky whites of the ghost. “Come on, Jawbone. There is something I want to show you.”
Whitney held out her hand, pulling Sam to her feet, before leading her off into the growing mist. Samantha couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her, so she followed her dead sister with a growing sense of anxiety, the kind that would build slowly until it had ensnared her ribcage. She would need her medication, probably needed it now. Mixing substances was something that normally didn’t faze her at all, but she wasn’t sure she even had her scripts on her; they were probably still in the car.
“It’s not much further,” Whitney promised, pulling Sam’s hand and mind closer to whatever their destination was. “Here we are.”
They had darted in and out of the rows of headstones, had moved so far into the fog, and walked for god knows how long. Samantha couldn’t be sure where they actually were. So she looked at the gravestone in front of her, the one with her name on it. Its death date indicated she had died in September of 1995.
“What is this?!” she demanded, not taking her eyes off the stone.
“Here lies Squidward’s hope and dreams,” Whitney responded, though in that deadpan that wasn’t really her voice again. “Look at the next one.”
Sam looked through her tears and fear at the next headstone in line. It also had her name on it, though this one claimed she had died in 1998. She moved on, the next one saying she had passed in 2002. After the fourth or fifth headstone (she couldn’t really be sure which), she looked to her right, finally noticing the endless row of gravestones. Was each one hers?
“You’ve died a lot in your lifetime,” Whitney’s ghost said, breaking the tense silence. “The first time, you were four. You decided you no longer wanted to dance, that ballet wasn’t for you. You weren’t too broken up about it.
“Or there was your death at the age of seventeen, the first time you had your heart broken. Would it make you feel better to know that that asshole shot himself three years ago?
“You died your last semester of college, your fear of not graduating devouring you. You died after your diagnosis, not sure how life on medication would be. You died after Whitney’s overdose, after your mother’s heart attack, after your father’s brief battle with cancer. You died last night, crying about today’s funeral.”
Samantha was still passively crying, the kind of crying that requires no effort on her part, as she surveyed all of the headstones, or at least the ones she could see. Death didn’t work that way. It was permanent. At least that’s what she kept telling herself. She slowly turned, inspecting her sister’s ghost for any hints of abnormality. Scientifically examining a ghost made no sense even to her drug-addled head.
“What are you?” Sam asked, somehow knowing it was the only question she would get an answer to.
“Entropy,” the thing that looked like her sister answered, crossing its arms behind its back and walking with the gravestones to its left. Sam got up to follow. “I am the slow decay of everything.”
“And in all your infinite wisdom, you felt like showing me my countless deaths?”
“Yes.” The thing parading around as Whitney offered no other response, just kept moving forward.
“Why?” Samantha yelled. “Why show me this? Why am I the only one with multiple fucking gravestones?!”
“Because, Jawbone, you needed to see your deaths to better understand your life.”
“Stop calling me that! Only Whitney used that name, and you aren’t her!”
“No,” Entropy remarked, stopping. “I’m not. Maybe you would rather look upon your mother.” With that, the thing morphed into Sam’s mom. Samantha vomited, emptying her stomach of the Taco Bell she had eaten earlier. “Your father?” It changed again, this time into Sam’s dad.
“STOP IT!” She yelled at the thing masquerading as her dead father.
“You need to see this, Samantha, all of it. Your family lived and died once, and that was it. But you…you die every night when you fall asleep, rising the next morning as something wholly new. You have lived thousands of lives in the short span of time you’ve spent on this planet, beautiful, wonderful lives.
“Everything dies once, Samantha. Everything rots and decays and becomes nothing. Everything, but you. You are the only thing I have ever seen come back day after wretched day.”
“Why do you need to show me this?” Sam asked in a whisper, her tears finally dry.
“Because you can’t give up!” the thing roared, a cacophonous amalgamation of every sound ever uttered. “You can’t die like everything else! If showing you how precious you are is the only way to make sure that today is just another day, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Entropy didn’t look like her father anymore. Or like her mother. Or like Whitney. It didn’t really look like anything, not that Sam could tell. Maybe that was because the mist had dissipated and the sun was shining again. Maybe it was because her head no longer felt like it was spinning and her father’s gravestone had the correct death date. So did her mother’s and sister’s.
Taking a shuddering breath, Samantha headed out of the cemetery, feeling alone. Lonely was something she could handle; at least she no longer felt like her time was fast approaching.
