Eleanor Rigby Read Online Free PDF Page A

drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!
    Nobody was home to witness my enigmatic arrival in a strange man’s car. It wasn’t until I had to jump up to reach for the house key in its hiding spot on the top brick that I realized I’d clutched my Tupperware container of blackberries perfectly level for over four hours, with not a single berry spilled.
    When I told my story at the dinner table, everybody just rolled their eyes and assumed I was being morbid. Mother said, “You need to be around people your own age more.”
    “I don’t like people my own age.”
    “Of course you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”
    “All the girls my own age do is shoplift and smoke.”
    Dad said, “No more dead body stories, dear.”
    “It’s not made up.”
    Leslie said, “Tanya wants to be a stewardess after school ends.”
    “The body is real.” I went to the phone and dialed the police station. How many fifth-grade students know the phone number of the local police station by heart? I asked for Officer Nairne to confirm my tale.
    Father took the phone. “Whoever this is, I’m sorry, but Liz—What? Oh. Really? Well I’ll be darned.” I had newly found respect.
    Father hung up the phone and sat back down. “It seems our Liz is on the money.”
    William and Leslie wanted gory details. “How far gone was he, Lizzie?”
    “Blue cheese gone?”
    “William!” Mother was being genteel. “Not at the dinner table.”
    “It actually looked like the roast pork we’re eating here.”
    Mother said, “Liz, stop right now!”
    Father added, “And you weren’t going to eat those blackberries, were you? I saw them in the fridge. The railways spray the worst sorts of herbicides along the right-of-ways. You’ll get cancer from them.”
    There was a charged silence. “Come on, everybody, I found a body today. Why can’t we just talk about it?”
    William asked, “Was he bloated?”
    “No. He’d only been there overnight. But he was wearing a skirt.”
    Mother said, “Liz! We can discuss this afterwards, but not, I repeat not , at the dinner table.”
    Father said, “I think you’re overreac—”
    “Leslie, how was swim class?”
    So there was my big moment, gone. But as of that night I began to believe I had second sight that allowed me to see corpses wherever they lay buried. I saw bodies everywhere: hidden in blackberry thickets, beneath lawns, off the sides of trails in parks—the world was one big corpse factory. Visiting the cemetery in Vancouver for my grandmother’s funeral a year later was almost like a drug. I could not only see the thousands of dead, but I began to be able to see who was fresh and who wasn’t. The fresh bodies still had a glow about them while the older ones, well, their owners had gone wherever it was they were headed. For me, looking at a cemetery was like looking at a giant stack of empties waiting to be handed in for a refund.
    Bodies. Oh, groan. I’ve always just wanted to leave this body of mine. What a treat that would be! To be a beam of light, a little comet, jiggling itself loose from these wretched bones. My inner beauty could shine and soar! But no, my body is my test in life.
    *    *    *
    William hustled the boys out after I finished the tale of the body. For once in their lives their Aunt Liz had, for a moment or two, fascinated them. I suspect that for a time Hunter and Chase thought I was a sorceress, too, albeit a boring sorceress with no food in her fridge.
    My relief that they’d gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal: it was one of those few moments that being by myself didn’t mean I had to feel lonely. When I think about it, I’ve never actually told another person