You Can't Get Tired

John brushed away the last grains of coarse dirt and felt the death all over again. He stared at the body until the beads of sweat gathered on his brow fell to the garbage bags and duct tape: the burial plastics. From the grave’s edge, Cody called his name a second time. The young man’s face was shrouded in night, his glowing frame like a graveyard angel in the car lights. He explained that dawn was upon them; they needed to leave.

The hardness of the coffin hurt John’s knees as he knelt down to scoop the body off the oak lid. He was surprised by the corpse’s weight. It seemed lighter than when they made the reverse trip to bury the body, suggesting to John not only that the soul has weight, but that it takes time for it to escape. You can believe in that or decomposition; it’s not the belief that matters.   

Together they weaved through plots and gravestones and laid the body on the gravel by the sedan. A month prior they had arrived in a spacious van, so it wasn’t until the car boot swung open that they realised the body wouldn’t fit this time, not without some coercion or contortion, some violation.

Cody had already suffered two hours of John brushing dirt from the body like a palaeontologist. They should be across town by now, rid of this mess. Already the horizon was changing hue. Soon the construction crews would arrive and then they would be caught. The time of delicacy was over. They needed to move, fast. 

Cody gripped the garbage bag by the neck and heaved the body up one-handed. But he managed only one step toward the boot before being blocked by John, who pushed his old hand against the young heart. 

“That I can’t allow,” said John.  

In the growing dawn, the two faced off. Cody was younger, taller, stronger. He could have done what he liked. He could have grabbed John by the throat and shoved both in the car boot - the dead and the old, one to be burned, one retired. But he didn’t, because there was another way. Instead, Cody paced to the rear doors and lowered the back seats. The body wrapped in garbage bags and tape was now laid out diagonally and at peace. 

“Happy now,” said Cody. 

John stared with horror on his old, squished face. 

“I meant nothing by it,” added Cody. “Let’s just get out of here.” 

The next step was to transport the body across town. In a few hours construction crews were to dig up the western plots - where the body had been buried - as part of the cemetery’s redevelopment. The coffins and gravestones (even flower wreaths) were to be moved south to make way for a multistorey carpark and gift shop. 

Cody lowered himself through the driver’s side door and appraised John in the passenger seat. Throughout the digging, John had refused to remove his jacket or tie, so his shiny suit was now caked in mud and clay. The shovel and brush had blistered his palms, and it was to those bloody hands which the old man’s focus was lost: the wrinkles and cuts and scars and blood and gold rings. 

Watching on, Cody felt a sudden sadness for what had become of John. But he pushed those feelings aside. He knew the best thing he could do for the old man was to get him and the dead body across town now. 

 The previous night Cody had been instructed by his father to shoot John and leave his corpse in the pit with the garbage-bagged body and whoever was in the coffin. The old man had become a liability, his father explained, and this way his death would redirect any blame for the Monsino killing. A good plan, yet here Cody was in the car with John, alive, the sky appearing a worrying shade of grey in the rearview mirror. 

Cody thought of the road and turned the key. But instead of an engine roar he was met with clanging pipes and a harsh rumbling that shook the chassis. The second time he turned the key the car’s electronics cut. Fumes rose from the hood toward the automobile afterlife. The engine was dead. 

“Just call your father,” said John. “He’ll send someone.” 

The two men were now standing by the steaming engine. Upon hearing John’s unsolicited suggestion, Cody slammed the bonnet. The thud prompted the first bird to part from the nearby tree line, its black silhouette floating on the greying sky, the coming day. Cody’s heart began to thump in his ears, timed with the bird wings. 

“Just call your father,” repeated John. 

The words reached Cody muffled, as though through a wall of dirt. “I’m calling no one,” he said. “This is my show. Let’s move. Now.”

Together they carried the body across the half-built gravel path and along the chain link fence that separated the western plots from the main construction site. 

The gravel path will one day form part of a scenic running track around the cemetery’s perimeter. Once completed, the track will loop from the new tollgate to the modern change facilities, enabling mourners (referred to in the redevelopment master plan as ‘customer personas’) to sneak in a 4.8km jog before saying farewell.

The track itself is not expected to provide revenue. Quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) metrics used in the cost benefit analysis (CBA), however, indicate it will provide modest health benefits. Essentially, more running means better societal health: fewer hospital visits, heart disease deaths. Death-reduction is obviously a supply-side risk for the cemetery, but most key stakeholders agree the old cemetery model simply wasn't working from a business sustainability perspective. More must be done with less, said someone, probably.        

Cody and John found a grid of open ‘transfer’ graves. These are pre-dug holes for the temporary storage of the dead. Cody explained how they would dig an extra few feet in one grave and bury the body below where a coffin will be placed later that day. This solution required the men to return, but it was their best option given the brightening sky, stirring birds, impending doom.

That deep, the ground was firmer than topsoil. Each strike with the shovel yielded only a handful of solid earth. Still, John forced his old bones and nerves and sinews to shovel fast and honest. He cursed the earth with each strike, as was his way, until his shirt received a second soaking of sweat, the suit another layer of dirt. 

Soon he had dug deep enough to place but not yet bury the body. By this time, the half-constructed building behind the chain-link fence stood like a grey fossil where earlier it was lost to night. The front gate too, through which the construction workers would soon arrive, was visible. Pairs of headlights, like searching eyes, now moved along the quiet road beyond the gate, each injecting Cody with a fresh surge of panic. 

And it was at the height of such a surge that the shovelhead shattered. In the grave, John had struck hidden rock, causing the steel head to now resemble a spear with a warped point. Fragments of its face lay on the grave bed like blurred mirrors. Its digging days, done.

“Well, that does it,” said John. “We are cursed. Seriously, call your father. Get him to send a car.” 

John tossed the shovel outside the pit and extended his hand. For some reason, maybe the light, he suddenly appeared to Cody as he once was, back when his hair was thick and black, his chest and belly wide like a bull’s. 

Back then John was twelve feet tall and otherworldly strong. In his father’s workshop, Cody would hide in empty boxes and listen to John’s thunderous steps shake the building, the world. John would tear the box lid free and pluck the boy from his hiding. He would tickle Cody mercilessly, then toss him over the railing into the cardboard bin below, and all the way down - the descent, the years - Cody giggled until, like most but not all children, he was afforded the chance to grow up. 

This memory of John didn’t so much fade as it did cut. Suddenly, the old man was there in the pit, unable to climb out on his own. The sorry sight launched Cody from his daze. He stepped forward and felt the frailty of that extended hand as he pulled John free. Now outside the hole stood John: old, small, weak, dim… 

John straightened his muddy tie like a boy. Cody watched and began to feel sick. The pistol stuck in his belt pressed against his coccyx: cold and deadly like his father’s hand pushing him along, not in time but deed. 

“The whole cemetery is full of holes,” he announced, his tone suddenly enthusiastic. “There will be another shovel. And we will find that shovel. And we will bury the body. And we will leave. Now, let’s go.”

Cody’s feet slipped in the mud as he paced toward a groundskeeper’s hut near the tree line. When he turned to make sure John was following, the old man was lowering himself on the grave’s edge. 

John’s eyes were vacant as he raided his pockets for a lighter, his legs dangling in the pit. “Another shovel,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Perhaps there will be another car too, or even better: a mechanic.” 

The burning cigarette tip faded to black and glowed once more. Cody marched through the mud back to the grave and took John by the shirt collar. He ripped the old man backwards and pressed him into the mud. Veins rose to the surface of John’s neck as he struggled to breathe. Cody’s trouser knees dampened as he studied the man who gave him piggy-back rides and cradled him before memory. 

“John,” he said, thrusting him into the ground a second time. “Enough… enough.” 

They shared a silent breath, eyes locked, before Cody loosened his grip. 

John made no attempt to move but gestured with his eyeballs towards the chain link fence and the grey half-built structure beyond. “Do you know what they’re building over there?” 

Cody glanced away and back to John. “Is that what this is about? John… I don’t care if they’re building a brothel. It doesn’t help anyone to go down for this. What’s done is done. Let’s just move the damn body.” 

“The body,” repeated John. “You mean the kid.”

Less than a shovel-length away glistened the garbage bag tomb of rippled plastic and tape. Inside lay fourteen-year-old Archie Monsino, his arms crossed over his chest. A month prior his parents and family had mourned an empty box somewhere else, like some sick practical joke. Now here lay a kid who saw something he shouldn’t have. Here lay a boy with a bullet in his brainbox. Here lay a child, exhumed in the morning chill.

Cody released John and let him climb to his feet. “John,” he said, tilting his head to find the older man’s eyes. “You and I would be in prison now,” he continued. “No, scrap that: we’d be fucking dead, both of us, and probably others. And the same will be true if we don’t move the body - him - now. John… answer me.”

The old man picked the cigarette from the mud and stuck it in his lips; it failed to light. He gazed again beyond Cody’s shoulder to the building site and said, “It doesn’t matter what would have happened; you know that, and you knew it then. He was just a kid.”  

Cody’s father’s words came to him then. Last night he had spoken riddles about how things are the way they are and how what needs to be done needs to be done. At the time his words were not compelling. But now Cody had the broken-down car, the splintered shovel, the recalcitrant John stuck in the past. 

Across the grave John twisted his heel into the mud. Again he resembled a fidgety child. As Cody watched the idle gesture, a strange calmness enveloped him: clarity. Then a flock of birds burst from the nearby tree line. When John spun to the sound, Cody removed the gun from his beltline and pointed it at the old man. 

“John,” he said, and John returned his attention and saw the gun. 

“Ahh,” said John. He nodded as though unphased, happy even, but soon his head fell to one side as though suddenly too heavy for his neck to carry. “Ahh,” he said again. “Okay. Okay.”

The sun then breached the height of the construction site and kissed John’s worn face, forcing him to squint. Blinded, he tried his hardest to smile at the man he drove to primary school and the dentist, but he failed. 

“I’m tired, kid,” he said, his heavy head dropping further, nothing left to hold it up. “So very tired.” 

Cody offered a waiter’s nod. “You can’t get tired,” he said. “In this world or of this world, you can’t get tired.” 

Then, a heartbeat later, he pulled the trigger.  

The last thing John would have seen was the half-built Starbucks behind the chain link fence. That’s where he turned, not to avoid the gun shot, but the betrayal. 

At that stage in the delayed construction, the Starbucks was still a mess of grey concrete walls and steel rods. The rods poking from the concrete slab-ends looked like ribs on some beast either half-excavated or ascending from below; John fancied it the latter: a hell beast wrought for this world. This would have been a sour end for John, no doubt, except for one thing: the gun trigger jammed. 

Cody smacked the pistol against his left hand and then pulled the trigger several more times. The trigger clicked like a metronome, too quiet even for the birds. 

The flaccid clicking continued. John dived atop the small dirt pile next to the grave and clasped the broken shovel-spear. When he stood back up, he faced his attacker. Whatever tiredness John had spoken of seemed gone. His eyes reflected nothing less intense than the sun itself. He again seemed twelve feet tall.  

Cody’s heart began to flee. Frozen, he watched John step with purpose over the body and around the grave. Cody was still the larger man, but something told him to run, so he threw the pistol overhand at John and sprinted for the construction site. Only once did he turn back to see John: cast gold by the sun, marching across the green pasture with the melting dew around him like rising steam, the glistening spear held aloft and sharp. 

Cody slinked through a gap in the fence. With his hands, he felt the rough concrete edge and deftly lunged around the corner. The footing was slippery, though, so he fell, and landed below on a stack of pipes. 

Inside the concrete structure the air was cold, the sun not yet high enough to bring light. Cody could not feel his left leg or cease the ringing in his head, yet he managed to crawl to the rear wall and prop his torso up. Wiping his mouth, there was blood, and when he looked to the half-built entrance, there was John. 

Detailed designs indicate that Cody was bleeding out in what would become the cafe’s storeroom. This small, rectangular space will soon house takeaway cups and serviettes and detergents and flavour sacks, and for years to come, Starbucks employees will complain of a strange, persistent banging on the storeroom ceiling.  

Though Cody’s death will in no way change the building designs, it will cause construction delays. These delays will be costed using labour rates, and perhaps there is no better way to measure the economic value of a rotten life than by the cost of its disposal, reduced to a number in a row of a budget, saved, forgotten. 

In the dark storeroom, John used the shovel-spear as support and lowered himself. Cody coughed up blood and reached out his hand, which John slapped away. 

“John,” he muttered. “Call my father… please.”

“There’s no use now,” said John. “But I’ll make sure you see him again very soon.” 

Cody went wide-eyed with horror. “John,” he muttered again. “The boy... The boy... The boy...”

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Writing Notes

In this piece, I mainly focused on two technical aspects:

• Providing a character with a dilemma

• Not negating tension

Dilemma. I wanted Cody to have to grapple with competing goods: his love for the old man, a pseudo father figure, and a utilitarian drive/his own self-interest.

In an earlier draft, I didn’t have this dynamic at all. The story basically went: everything breaks down, Cody decides to leave, John just stays and waits to be arrested. The story was centrally about John’s fatigue with the world, the Starbucks, things not working.

Yes, okay, this was kind of a way of expressing my rage at QR codes on tables in restaurants. I once ruined a perfectly suboptimal first date by ranting about those damn codes for twenty minutes.

Now, with Cody being forced to choose between the pragmatic killing of John and his less pragmatic love, I think the story works better. In future, I’ll seek to identify competing goods, not to tell a different story, but just because it enables greater conflict/tension.

Not negating tension. Creating tension is important and hard. But sometimes we establish tension only to let it off the hook. I owe this realisation to Chuck Palahniuk’s Substack, Plot Spoiler (below).

Chuck has a great series called ‘Gloves Off’ where he comments on other writers’ short stories. Not negating tension is something he regularly mentions.

In my first draft, I was guilty of letting the tension go. I had ratcheted it up as best I could: Cody had the orders to kill, the hidden gun, John was not playing ball, the sun was coming up. But then I basically had Cody say, “Well, I’m going to try to find a shovel.” He went looking and when he got back John had done some reflection and told Cody he was a really nice guy. All the tension was lost.

In subsequent drafts, I made it so I couldn’t go back. Any tension established had to be maintained, raised or (not sex related) climaxed. Looking back, it’s hard for me to imagine this story without Cody’s dilemma and the rising tension.

Well, in closing, I hope you enjoyed reading this story. If you did, please consider sharing it and subscribing.

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Fiction workshop. Original absurd, satire and humour writing. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut, Adams, and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO).