“Coming Back” by MikasiWolf (read by Dralen)

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You’re listening to the Ghost of Dog

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on The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

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and Tonight’s story is

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“Coming Back” by MikasiWolf,

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a Singaporean Wolf Mercenary writer.

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“Coming Back” has formerly appeared in the Texas Furry Fiesta Conbook

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(2016).

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His works have been published

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by Thurston Howl Publications,

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Rabbit Valley, Goal Publications among others.

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You can find links to more of his stories

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on his FA or WikiFur page.

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Read by Dralen, the Dapper Dragonfox.

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Fear like anything else can be diluted by time,

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can be lost in translation.

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The Ghost of Dog would remind you, listeners,

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that the myth of the zombie when it arose among the enslaved populations of the caribbean

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was about a very specific

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that death would be no different from life,

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and could not save one

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from being forced to work.

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And so we present a tale meant to examine the idea,

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if death were no release,

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if eternity were spent merely doing more of the same as life,

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what else might be possible?

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“Coming Back”

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by MikasiWolf

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One never knows what exactly to believe in

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till the day they die.

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Is it in Heaven? A land of everlasting glory that awaited you?

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Or is it Hell, an eternity of purgatory,

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with fire and brimstone cooking the fur, blood and sins out of you?

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I can tell you for a fact that it's neither.

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When Joseph Snyder caved my head into the sidewalk for a few dollars and my four-year old IPhone,

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I felt free. Free from the earthly bonds that had defined my life

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ever since I arrived in this world.

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Relieved I would no longer feel the pain of heartbreak from when Jessy-Maria the raccoon dumped me.

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Thankful I no longer felt the sting of rejection from Pa kicking me out of the family,

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all because I dated outside of my species.

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Bayou folk were conservative like that.

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My life was one of constant

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pain, a suffering prolonged by a stretched-out existence.

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My ears and tail had always lain flat when I lived,

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something considered

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disrespectable for a canid,

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a coyote to boot.

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So when I finally died,

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I was in this wonderful

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state of bliss; no thoughts,

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no worries, no nothing.

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Everything just felt so right and calm.

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That was the first time my tail briefly stood,

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right as my life melted into the sidewalk.

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I was finally free from all the troubles and shit the world had to offer.

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So believe me when I tell you how

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angry I was when a novice Magic Man brought me back to life.

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No member of the living could ever understand the shock and fury at being ripped out of one's well-deserved peace,

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and it was as much my rage as his belief

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that I should be grateful,

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that had me wringing his own life out of him.

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Or perhaps, in some sick way, that was his own plan all along.

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To die in peace once he’d the chance to fulfill the

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unthinkable. But the Bokor,

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the Magic Men. were the only ones who could undo the spell they wrought,

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and I thus found myself

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in a state of unliving.

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I was neither dead

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nor alive, but somewhere in between;

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able to remember the thoughts, anguish and regrets that had plagued my living and waking life.

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I was back to suffer all

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over again. I was lucky that Bokor was but a novice, anyone stronger and I would have remained a mindless slave for them.

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It's not all that bad;

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but it wasn't all that good either.

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Contrary to belief, we of the unliving,

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the Risen, still need to eat.

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The only difference is that I can eat eggs and toast and it tastes no different from

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days-old beef left to fester in the sun.

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You can bring the dead back to life,

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but some things just remain so.

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My sense of taste. My sense of touch.

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My wish to be in another world aside from this one.

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The loss of a sense of smell that had rivaled so many other coyotes.

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It was about the only thing I did well in, for all the good it mattered.

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Living didn't matter to me anymore,

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but you can't die twice.

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Believe me, I've tried.

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Broken legs and arms were a terrible inconvenience, so I didn’t try that more than once.

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We could still heal;

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albeit slowly. Having little else to do, I visited my old haunts.

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Not having a corpse and all, or any family that gave a shit,

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there wasn't any report made about my "disappearance",

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so I was free to wander around as long as I stayed out of the public eye.

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When I needed to go into town for food, I kept to the shadows, always

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away from the canids.

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I could only imagine how much I must stink,

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being half-dead and all.

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Water only seemed to make things worse, for some reason,

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so aside from wipe-downs in public restrooms, I pretty much gave up any chance of cleanliness.

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Life in the land of the Bayou

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ain't a bed of roses,

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and some say it's as much the inconvenience of moving

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as the roots our families had set here that makes us stay.

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It wasn't like I had anywhere else to go,

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and even the dead love the familiarity of the places we had lived

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and finally died

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in. It anchored me,

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gave me some semblance of a meaningful existence. As long as I acted like it was business as usual,

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I remained sane. It’s surprising, really,

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that with so many people living and having died here,

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I was the only free Risen around these parts.

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It’s not like there weren’t any more Bokor around,

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but more and more people moved to the cities these days.

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Not many wanted to spend years studying a discipline that may either earn a pitiful income in the sticks,

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or label one as a nutcase in the cities.

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I have to admit a year of roughing it on my own got real lonesome.

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Once, I’ve considered talking to the townsfolk;

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but what guarantee do I have that they wouldn’t see through me at once?

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A scraggly pelt held together by greyish skin isn’t exactly a sign of good health, let alone being alive.

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It probably wasn’t

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illegal to be undead,

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as I was technical still a citizen,

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but the fact I was supposed to be made dead by a crime meant I couldn’t exactly rely on faith and goodwill

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of possibly not-so upstanding citizens.

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I thus resigned myself to the fate that

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as long as I existed,

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I would go it alone.

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As they say, that’s Life.

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Or in my case, that’s Death for you.

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And so here I was,

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sitting at my favorite outlook at the edge of Barren's Pass,

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when I heard a loud sobbing.

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Now, it is said that

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feeding one of the Risen such as me salt,

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would save us from our state of unliving.

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Given that I enjoyed having some semblance of life, pathetic as it was, I wasn't keen in finding out if that were true.

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But the sobs and caterwauling seemed so familiar,

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so alluring,

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that I realized I would never forgive myself if I didn't take a closer look.

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I crept up to the source of the sound,

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a precipice at the edge of the hill.

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And it was then I saw her.

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Jessy-Maria looked nothing like how I remembered her.

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Seated on a rock, her normally immaculately-groomed sleek fur was

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matted all over, with the swamp having plastered her fur in places.

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She held her face in her paws, which were themselves soiled and worn.

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Her mask creased and wrinkled as her paws left her face.

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There were no tears.

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Her eyes were just like mine,

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half-dead but still seeing,

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tear ducts having

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long receded into her walking corpse.

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A crudely-stitched gash at her side showed,

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further confirming what her eyes told me.

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Another of my kind walked.

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"It feels really lonely here,"

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whined Jessy as her paw went over her heart,

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and in that instant,

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all my past grief at her snub faded.

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"However could you manage it, Tazzy?

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How do you go through all this, and not

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wish you were never brought back to being?"

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Her voice ended in a rill,

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echoing across the night's silence.

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A sound so lonely even the dead could feel the chills.

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"By waiting all this time for you,"

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I said, and for the first time in my life and death,

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I felt complete. It was said that unfinished business could make the departed restless enough to rise from the dead under certain conditions,

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and I realized with

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a spring of hope

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that perhaps Jessy wanted

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to be reunited with me after all.

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Our families may be intolerant and bigoted,

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but perhaps even in death

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there’s hope of a life

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for us both. This was

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“Coming Back” by MikasiWolf,

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read for you by [NAME, with CALLSIGN.]

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As always, you can find more stories on the web

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at thevoice.dog,

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or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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Thank you for listening

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to The Ghost of Dog.