MY FIRST DAY DEAD

A Tale of Sogmarsh — from the other side of the moped.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I died on a Tuesday, in my sleep, which I am reliably informed is the polite way to go about it. I was a turnip-weaver by trade in Lowmoss, out in the turnip country of the Bogmoor — and no, before you ask, I never did work out what a turnip-weaver weaves; nobody in the village could tell me either, and I had forty years to enquire. I went to bed a craftsman of uncertain craft, and I woke up dead, which is a great deal like waking up early: cold, faintly surprised, and quite sure someone somewhere has made a clerical error.

The first thing I learned about death in Sogmarsh is that it does not, in any meaningful sense, start.

I had the slip. Everyone gets the slip — a pink pre-printed thing from the Sog & District Reaping Authority, delivered (in my case) by a damp moth that had clearly read it first.

REGRET TO INFORM STOP COLLECTION SCHEDULED TUESDAY STOP PLEASE BE PACKED AND GROUND-FLOOR STOP

I was packed. I was ground-floor. I was, if anything, early.

The moped was not.

So I waited, as you do, and I learned the second thing about death in Sogmarsh, which is that it is overwhelmingly administrative. I was to report to one Mr. Mortlake, a cheerful undertaker who keeps the register in the crypt and who, on seeing me, sighed the particular sigh of a man whose in-tray has just gained another sheet. He gave me a number. He gave me a cup of lukewarm chicory tea. And he directed me to the queue — which is kept, he explained, by Saint Tarry, the patron of the about-to-be-served, and which has the remarkable property of never, ever moving, while remaining at all times just about to.

I shall spare you most of it. But I will mention the indignities, because no one warns you.

You still shed earwax. Phantom earwax — a faint, glowing grey dust that a ghost produces precisely as a living man does, and which gathers, slowly and luminously, in the corner behind the wardrobe where no broom will ever reach it, as a monument to the fact that death frees you from absolutely none of your body's stupider habits. I had imagined a great many things about the hereafter. I had not imagined dusting.

I went, as is the custom, to my own funeral. The free kitchen in the Woods sent up the mutton broth; the mourners agreed it tasted of wet straw and ate it anyway, weeping. I sat at the back, as a soul should, and I did not correct the eulogy, though the eulogy was extremely generous about my turnip-weaving and implied a level of skill that I, the turnip-weaver, had never once witnessed. This is the etiquette. You let them embroider. They earned it.

And all the while, I felt the third thing — the thing nobody will say out loud.

Everywhere else in the world, I am told, the dead simply leave. A line is drawn, a slot slides open, off you pop. But here, the nearer you are to the castle, the more the leaving jams. The queue thickens. The slot sticks. The air grows crowded with people who, by every right, should have gone on years and years ago, and who instead linger about the place complaining of the damp and attending dinners. Something holds us. Nobody can say what. We do not discuss it, the way you do not discuss a draught when there is no window to blame.

I confess my first day dead was shaping up to be a disappointment. Cold tea, an unmoving queue, eternal dusting, and a moped that may or may not arrive before the next reign.

And then I came out to the gate to wait for it anyway — and there, sitting in the mud as though no time at all had passed, with his tail going like a flag in a gale, was my dog.

He had been dead thirty years. I buried him myself, under the willow, and cried in a way a grown turnip-weaver is not supposed to. And he had spent those thirty years — I have since been told, by a kind scullery-ghost named Edith who showed me where to stand — chewing through the paperwork. Gnawing, patiently, illegally, through three decades of the lower circles' red tape: every form, every transfer, every stamped and triplicate refusal, reduced to spit and confetti, all so that he could get back up to the gate and be sitting in exactly the right spot when his man finally came through it.

He did not care about the queue. He did not care about Saint Tarry or the slot or the moped or the embroidered eulogy. He had one piece of unfinished business, and it was me, and he had simply waited.

I sat down beside him in the mud. There was, of course, no chair — there is never a chair — but I found I did not especially mind.

The afterlife, it turns out, is mostly administrative. But the company more than makes up for the lack of a chair.