You'll Wake the Dead

by Joseph Grant

It wasn’t my idea to conduct such an experiment; in reality, it was my stupid friend from MIT. Not that he is of a sub-par intelligence; no he is quite the opposite, a brilliant man who doesn’t always have the brightest of ideas, but who somehow dragged me, a man of reasonable astuteness, to accompany him to Calvary Cemetery, overlooking the blinking lights of Midtown Manhattan in the middle of a freezing October night and why I agreed is beyond me, but yet there we were, disturbing the graves of the departed. Apparently, my friend had read in some East European auto journal how the dead were being used in their unique biodegradable state as excellent sources of alternative fuel and the whole procuring process only took a matter of minutes with each volunteer, if you will. It made little sense to me, but much sense to my friend, a cheapskate by birthright of equally skin-flint parents of East Far Rockaway and it was my friend who schemed to take the alternative gas market by storm with its natural, endless supply of the free of charge deceased. Ethics and decency aside, as these were never my friend’s strong points, he had concocted a devious drilling and siphoning device using kind of a reverse livor mortis embalming procedure as maybe the best way to describe it, to draw up the raw natural resources from the lifeless, but typically and absentmindedly, he cut costs from the magazine blueprint and also forgot to probably carry a two somewhere along the line in his calculations and therefore as we were approximately on our seventy-fifth corpse, something wasn’t right. For as we scrambled back to the car amidst the disturbed graves of some of the worst criminals and gangland murderers in history, my wife’s admonition of: “You’ll wake the dead!” became prophetically true.

6S

Joseph Grant is one of 6S's favorite sons, and the hits just keep on coming.