The lawnmower was a hot bee droning back and forth across the grass. The unrelenting sunshine had pushed the grass up higher than usual.
Watching the rows upon rows be shorn down gave Miranda the same feeling she used to get from watching viral videos of disembodied hands slicing mounds of kinetic sand: Dull satisfaction. The young man β either Dan or Don or Doug, something like that β pushing the mower across her lawn chomped fervently on a large piece of pink chewing gum. It was the smell of the grass she missed the most, but she could remember it if she really tried. It was a damp smell. One of life.
Of living. It had been just long enough that she could laugh at the ridiculousness of the statement. But without a throat, the laugh was silent. The remembering of smells and laughter made Miranda curious. It had been days, maybe weeks, months? She glided up the stairs into the bathroom.
Now, her body looked like a black-yellow-orange bloated person-shaped bag. She watched a documentary once about a body farm used by the FBI to help them identify stages of human decay, so she knew the how and why behind the dark fluids that pooled around her. She returned back downstairs dismayed. In that moment across the country, an old high school friend opens his laptop.
He checks the news. Wild fires in California. A truck in London driven into a group of tourists, 4 dead, 15 severely injured. He shudders internally and pulls his bathrobe instinctively around him, as if it could shield him from the horror in the world.
