Author: Mark Budman

The Scrabble board and the box fell apart first, but my wife and I soldiered on. We glued the board together with a homemade glue, and the letter pieces made of real wood were still alive. Scrabble was our best way of killing time. What else could you do here? Sleep and talk? You can’t sleep and talk 24/7, can you?
When we played, my wife always won. I tried to keep her feet and hands warm when we slept, which was much more difficult. When we talked, we gossiped about our neighbors. All of them were ugly, and so were we, but we skipped talking about us. Too depressing.
We bought our housing long ago, on the pre-need plan, but moved in only recently, after the car accident. It was a nice duplex, small and a bit morbid, but cozy. No bathroom, no kitchen, no living room, no utilities, no windows, no Internet, no fire alarms. Who needed that anyway around here?
We never left our place during the day because we wanted to stay unseen. We only saw our neighbors at night, which made watching them in the moonlight a tad more tolerable. But we invited the next-door couple, April and Logan Mortuum, to play Scrabble last night. They lived in our, um, development longer than we did. Both were fashionably thin and mostly naked. I forced myself not to stare at April. There was not much to see anyway. We offered them some veggies. Mostly roots. They nibbled politely. We listened to the music from outside our development. We played three times, and my wife won all three.
“She has no flesh on her bones,” my wife said when they left, leaving the faint smell of April’s perfume behind. Something vaguely French. I think they call it “Perr Ish.” It’s in high fashion in this development.
My wife was right, as always. April had just a few scraps of skin and meat left on her bones. So did Logan. A veggie diet would do that to you.
“I’m glad you are still shapely, darling,” I said politely.
“You ass kisser,” she said, smiling. She could be a flirt sometimes. I love that about her.
At least I guessed my wife was smiling. She still had most of her lips left. We were so glad our last name was not as aristocratic as April and Logan’s. Who would want to be called Mister and Misses De Compose?
My wife and I held each other’s bony hands and slept in our antonym to the living room. We will play again tomorrow. Or the next year, or the next century, whenever we wake up next time. And we would wake up, right? Death will never do us part. If we close our eyes, we would believe that.