Chen had been possessing his own corpse for thirty-two years now, and he had the routine down to a science.
Every morning at 6:47 AM, just as the sun hit the aluminum siding of his trailer, he'd slip out of the ether. He would hover for a moment, looking down at his earthly remains—which he kept stored in a walk-in freezer he'd bought from a failed restaurant—and then slide back into his body like putting on a familiar, slightly damp jacket. It was peaceful. Predictable. It smelled faintly of mothballs and formaldehyde.
Until Marcus sneezed.
Marcus had been walking by Chen's trailer on his morning jog, breathing in the fresh morning air (and the pollen count, which was astronomical). The sound exploded through the thin walks of the mobile home park like a foghorn.
ACHOOO!
It was a sneeze of biblical proportions.
Chen, mid-possession, flinched in the spirit realm. It was a rookie mistake, a momentary lapse in concentration. His consciousness wobbled, veered hard to the left instead of the right, and suddenly he was falling.
He wasn't falling into the cold, still familiarity of his own remains. He was falling into something warm. Something pulsating. Something loud.
Chen opened his eyes—Marcus's eyes—and gasped. The air rushed into lungs that actually expanded. He felt a thump-thump-thump in his chest that wasn't there yesterday. He looked down at his hands. They were tan. They were warm. And
Most importantly, they weren't gray.
"Oh no," Chen said. His voice sounded deep and resonant, not raspy and dead. "Oh, no, no, no…"
Across the lot, Chen's actual body stood frozen in front of his trailer, empty as a vacant parking lot, staring blankly at a plastic flamingo.
Twenty minutes later, the entire population of Dead End Row was crammed into the Henderson family's doublewide. Mr. Henderson had to duck under his own ceiling fan, and two of the Henderson kids were sitting on the kitchen counters so there was room for everyone. Vida sat in the corner wearing her full sun protection getup despite being indoors—floppy hat, duck-patterned bathrobe, giant white sunglasses. The mail lady's wheelchair-fish-tank took up most of the kitchen area, her teal scales catching the light.
Ricky perched on the arm of the couch, looking twitchy. The next full moon was in three days and he was already feeling it. He really didn't want a repeat of last time when he ended up in the pound next to a gassy Basset Hound.
Chen—currently wearing Marcus like a cheap suit—stood in the middle of the room wringing Marcus's hands. He kept tripping over his own feet because he wasn't used to being functional.
"I don't know what happened!" Chen wailed, his voice booming. "He sneezed and I just…slipped! It was like hitting a patch of spiritual ice!"
"Where's your body at now?" Mrs Henderson asked, her massive frame blocking most of the hallway.
"Still standing at my trailer front door." Chen replied. "Just standing there. Empty."
"Creepy…"one of the Henderson kids whispered from the kitchen.
Marcus's spirit hovered near the ceiling, translucent and extremely unhappy.
"This is the stuff of nightmares," Marcus groaned, his ghostly voice echoing slightly like a bad radio signal. "Do you know how weird it is to watch your own body walking around without you? You're slouching! Stop slouching! I have good posture!"
"At least you get this body," Chen argued, gesturing to himself. "It doesn't rot like mine does. And the knees work! I haven't felt a knee work since Reagan was in office.
Mira raised a webbed hand. "Have you tried, I don't know, just switching back?"
"Of course I tried that! I can't get out of here and get back into my body! I've never been able to possess another body before! Objects yes, people no."
Marcus was still flying around, agitated, passing through a lampshade. "And I've tried pushing him back out and it's not working either. He's stuck in there like a tick. A ghostly tick!"
Vida adjusted her sunglasses. "Well, isn't this quite the predicament? It's like Freaky Friday, but with more decay."
"We could kill him," Dale said from his spot by the door. He was holding his generic BEER can, looking totally unbothered by the chaos.
Everyone turned to stare at him.
"Dale," Mrs Henderson sighed. "That's not helpful."
"I'm just saying, we could—"
"NO!" everyone shouted.
For the next hour, they tried everything.
Mrs Lawson suggested screaming at Chen (as Marcus), theorizing that fear might "scare his spirit out." This resulted in all three Lawson family members wailing their banshee screams directly at Marcus's face.
The windows rattled. A vase exploded. Chen stumbled backward, ears ringing, but still firmly planted in Marcus's body.
"My ears!" Marcus's ghost shouted. "You're damaging my hearing! I need that for hunting!"
Ricky offered to Marcus's ankle. "Sometimes the pain helps with things, you know? Shock to the system. Biting you back to reality."
"I'm a spirit, that won't help! I won't feel it!" Marcus yelled from the ceiling.
"I was talking to Chen wearing your body."
Chen lifted Marcus's leg protectively. "Nobody is biting anything! These are rental ankles! I don't want to explain teeth marks to him later."
Mr Henderson tried to physically pull Marcus's body away from the general area, theorizing that distance might pull the spirits apart. It did not help. It just resulted in Chen, in Marcus's body, being carried around the living room like a confused sack of potatoes while flailing his limbs.
After the fifteenth terrible suggestion this one involving the Henderson kids throwing frozen pees at Chen's empty corpse to 'wake it up'), Chen finally threw up Marcus's hands.
"Okay. Okay…I have an idea. We pack up my body and take it down to Little Tony. He's the only one who understands how these ghost/corpse things work. Maybe he can….I don't know, swap us back? Service the body? Reboot the system?"
Vida stood up. Her bathrobe duckies swishing at her feet, sounding almost like they were quacking. "I'll drive. But if any fluids get on my upholstery, I'm billing you, both."
Fifteen minutes later, they were loading Chen's very stiff, very dead body into the back seat of Vida's ancient Buick. It was like trying to fold a lawn chair that had rusted open. Marcus's spirit floated anxiously beside them. "Watch the head! I just paid for that hair cut!"
"It's Chen's head, Marcus." Vida reminded him. "Your head is currently attached to the body Chen is currently driving."
"It's confusing!!" Marcus wailed.
Chen, wearing the Marcus-bodysuit, got into the passenger seat. "Why can't I drive? I have reflexes now."
"Because what would happen if, for some reason, you left Marcus's body while you were driving down Highway 52?" Vida asked him, starting the engine. "We'd have a driver without an internal co-pilot careening into traffic. Consider me neutral territory."
Marcus's spirit phased through the back door and settled in beside Chen's corpse. He stared at the back of his own head in the passenger seat—Chen's consciousness still piloting his body—and felt a headache coming on, despite the fact of not having a physical brain at the moment.
"This the worst day of my afterlife," Marcus muttered.
"You're not dead yet," Chen offered from the front seat, turning around to look at his own corpse. "Hey, do I really look that gray?"
"Yes." Vida and Marcus said in unison.
Little Tony's office was in the industrial part of town where things went to get fixed or forgotten. Chain-link fences, rust-stained buildings, and the distinct smell of something that was either industrial chemicals or a very dead raccoon.
Vida pulled the ancient Buick up to a corrugated metal building with a hand-painted sign that read: LITTLE TONY'S ETERNAL CARE–DISCRETION IS GUARANTEED–NO REFUNDS. Marcus's spirit floated through the car door. "I'll wait here. I can't watch this. It's to meta."
Vida stared at him. "I think we'll need you hunter man."
Chen and Vida hauled his corpse out of the back seat, each taking an arm and draping it over their shoulders. Chen's dead head lolled forward, tongue slightly protruding, and his feet dragged on the gravel as they shuffled toward the building entrance like a depressing three-legged race.
"This is humiliating," Chen muttered through Marcus's mouth. "I look like I'm drunk on my own embalming fluid."
"Just keep moving," Vida adjusted her sun hat with her free hand. "And try to look natural."
"I'm dragging my own dead body! How does one look natural doing that?"
The air in Little Tony's workshop was thick with the scent of pine-scented floor cleaner and something that smelled suspiciously like a short circuit. Marcus, or rather the translucent, shimmering vapor that used to be Marcus, hovered three inches from the ceiling fans, vibrating with a frequency that made the nearby lightbulbs flicker.
In the middle of the room, sitting on an upside-down bucket in front of a line of black-market caskets, was none other than, Stoner Brandon.
He was polishing a casket with a dirty rag, humming "Don't Fear the Reaper" completely off-key. He looked up as they entered, his eyes going wide.
"DUUUUDDDEEE. It's Miss Vampire Lady."
Vida sighed, her sunglasses sliding down her nose. "I told you to stop calling me that."
"Chill, Vamp Momma." Brandon's attention drifted to Chen's body sagging between them. He tilted his head, really looking at it—the gray skin, the stiff limbs, the total lack of breathing.
"Oh my god," Chen squeaked out through Marcus's mouth, struggling to keep his own corpse upright.
"Dude," Brandon scratched his head with the polishing rag, "I hate to be the bearer of bad juju, but I think your friend there has already caught the train to Deadsville, man. That train has left the station."
"Where's Little Tony?" Chen asked desperately. "Me and my friend have a little problem only he can fix."
Stoner Brandon stood slowly, like he was moving through maple syrup. He walked over and leaned in close to Chen's corpse, sniffing loudly.
"Okay, so like, there is a do-it-yourself dog wash around the corner. Maybe you should take him and like…I don't know, man, give him a bath? He's ripe. He smells like my grandma's attic, but wet."
"THAT'S MY BODY!" Chen shouted.
"Right on, man. Right on," Brandon nodded sagely. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law, but hygiene is ten-tenths of a good time."
He shuffled toward the back door. "I'll go get Little Tony."
A moment later, a door in the back swung open and out walked Little Tony.
He wasn't little at all. He was six-foot-four and built like someone who wrestled bears for fun. He wore a stained apron and had reading glasses perched on his nose, which somehow made him look both intimidating and scholarly at the time.
"Chen," Tony said, nodding at the body between Marcus-Chen and Vida. He looked at the corpse, then at Marcus-Chen.
Chen tapped Marcus's chest. "I'm in here."
"Chen." Tony nodded again. "Possession mishap? Sneeze?"
"How did you know?" Chen asked.
"Happens more than you'd think. Pollen season is dangerous for the spectral community."
"Well, we have a slight problem here," Vida said flatly.
"I can see that." Little Tony walked over and lifted one of the corpse's eyelids, peering into the cloudy eye underneath. "Classic dislocation. Soul slippage." He let the eyelid drop.
"Well, I have good news and bad news."
"Bad news first," Vida said.
"Bad news is, to get Chen out of that body, we're gonna have to kill it."
There was a long silence. The air conditioning hummed.
"What?!?" Chen and Marcus's voice—sticking his head through the wall–shouted si
"Let me get this straight," Marcus's voice echoed, sounding like a frantic phone call from a tunnel. "You want to… kill me? To save me?"
Little Tony didn't look up from his workbench. He was currently wiping a layer of pepperoni grease off a pair of heavy-duty defibrillator paddles. "Not kill kill you, Marcus. Just… pause you. It's a hard reset. You ever have your phone freeze, and you have to hold the power button until the screen goes black? Same principle."
"I am not an iPhone 14!" Marcus shrieked, his ghostly form turning a frantic shade of neon violet. "I have a high-yield savings account! I have a pulse!"
"Actually," Chen said, looking down at Marcus's hands—which he was currently inhabiting—with a critical eye. "The pulse is currently 110. You're giving yourself quite the workout, buddy. Maybe take a deep breath? Oh, wait. I'm the one with the lungs."
Chen inhaled deeply, a look of pure ecstasy crossing Marcus's face. "Man, I forgot how much oxygen kicks. It's like drinking a cold soda with your chest."
"STOP ENJOYING MY ALVEOLI!" Marcus roared, diving through a stack of empty pizza boxes.
Vida leaned against a stack of "slightly used" caskets, her giant white sunglasses reflecting the chaos. "Look, Marcus, we've been over this for two hours. Your spirit is locked into the 'Live' frequency, and Chen is accidentally jammed into your hardware. The only way to get the signal to drop is to turn the hardware off."
"This is the stuff of nightmares," Marcus groaned, his head passing through a corrugated metal wall and then popping back in. "Do you know how weird it is to watch your own body agree to its own murder? Stop nodding! I don't give you permission to nod with my neck!"
Chen stopped nodding immediately. "Sorry. Force of habit. I've been dead thirty-two years; nodding is usually the only way I communicate when my jaw freezes shut."
"Okay, enough chatter," Little Tony grunted, kicking a casket toward the center of the room. It was lined with faded purple satin that looked like it had seen better decades. "Chen, hop in the box. Marcus, stay close. If we time this right, the moment your heart stops, Chen gets ejected like a piece of burnt toast. Then, the vacancy sign goes up, and you slide back in before the brain realizes the lights are off."
Marcus floated over the casket, staring down at the satin pillow. "And if I don't? If the brain… realizes? If I just stay a cloud forever?"
Stoner Brandon, who had been quietly chewing on a toothpick in the corner, chimed in. "Dude, Tony's like, ninety percent sure. That's a solid A-minus, man. In the grand cosmic scheme, ninety percent is basically a guarantee. Unless you're playing XCOM. Then you're screwed."
"Ninety percent?!" Marcus's ghost began to spin in a tight, agitated circle. "I'm betting my entire existence on an A-minus from a guy who uses pizza boxes as coasters?"
"Ninety-two," Tony corrected, checking the charge on the paddles. "I found the manual."
Marcus looked at Vida. She just tilted her hat. He looked at Chen, who was currently lying down in the casket, carefully adjusting Marcus's limbs so they wouldn't get cramped.
"Fine," Marcus whispered, his voice cracking with spectral static. "But if I end up haunting a toaster because of this, I'm spending eternity burning your bagels, Chen. Every. Single. One."
The room went silent. The hum of the industrial refrigerator in the back seemed to grow louder.
"Ready?" Tony asked, holding the pillow.
"Wait!" Marcus shouted. "Tell my mom I… actually, don't tell her anything. She'll think I'm a loser for getting possessed during a sneeze."
"Duly noted," Vida said.
Tony placed the pillow down.
For thirty seconds, the only sound was the muffled struggle of Marcus's lungs fighting for air—lungs that Marcus was currently watching from a bird's-eye view. It was a visceral, sickening sight. His own heels kicked against the satin. His own hands clawed at Tony's beefy forearms.
Then, a sudden, violent POP.
A burst of blue light erupted from Marcus's chest. Chen's spirit was flung backward, looking like a blurred photograph, before slamming into his own gray, mothball-scented corpse leaning against the wall.
"Gah!" Chen's corpse wheezed, its eyes snapping open. "The smell! I forgot I smelled like a bargain basement!"
"He's out!" Vida shouted. "Tony, now!"
Marcus's body lay perfectly still in the casket. To Marcus, the ghost, it felt like the world had gone mute. The tether that connected him to his physical self—a shimmering cord he hadn't noticed until now—had snapped. He felt light. Terrifyingly light.
"CLEAR!"
THUMP.
The body jolted, but the heart remained silent.
"Tony…" Marcus whispered, his spirit fading at the edges. "Tony, the A-minus… the A-minus is failing…"
"I said CLEAR!" Tony roared, slamming the paddles down again.
CRACK.
A spark jumped from the machine. Marcus felt a sudden, violent vacuum-pull. It wasn't a choice; it was a physical law. The vacancy sign had been lit, and the universe abhorred a vacuum.
Marcus's world went black.
Then, it went red. Then, it went painful.
He inhaled—a jagged, burning, glorious gulp of air that tasted like dust and leftover formaldehyde from. He felt the weight of his bones. He felt the itch of his socks. He felt the frantic, panicked thudding of a heart that had just been jump-started like a 2004 Honda Civic.
"I'm alive!" Marcus screamed, sitting bolt upright in the casket and clutching his chest. "I HAVE A PULSE! IT'S LOUD! WHY IS IT SO LOUD?"
"Welcome back to the land of the living, man," Brandon said, offering a slow-motion thumb-up. "Total epicness."
Marcus looked at his hands. They were tan. They were sweating. They were his. He climbed out of the casket, his legs shaking so hard he nearly took out a display of urns.
"Never again," Marcus wheezed, pointing a finger at Chen, who was currently trying to pop his own shoulder back into its socket. "From now on, when I sneeze, you stay at least fifty feet away from my aura. You hear me?"
Chen rasped out a dry, rattling laugh. "Deal, Marcus. But hey, look on the bright side."
"There is no bright side to being murdered in a basement, Chen!"
"Sure, there is," Chen said, gesturing to the exit. "Now you know exactly what your funeral is going to look like. Personally? I think the purple satin really brings out your eyes."
Marcus stared at him, then at Vida, then at Little Tony. Then at Stoner Brandon, who was still giving the thumbs-up with a stupid grin on his face.
"I need a drink," Marcus said finally.
"Dale's probably got a beer." Vida suggested.
"He's always got beer," Chen agreed.
"Next time you possess something other than yourself," Marcus said to Chen, pointing a shaky finger at him. "Double-check the address first."
"Deal." Chen looked down at himself. "Although, now that I'm back in here. I definitely need some work done. My left ear is loose again. Tony, you got time?"
Little Tony pulled out a clipboard. "I can fit you in next Tuesday. We got a special on elbow grease."
"Perfect."
As they headed toward the door, Stoner Brandon called after them. "Hey, you guys want that casket? We got a two-for-one deal running! Great for storage!"
"We're good," Vida called back over her shoulder.
"Your loss, Vamp Momma."
They piled back into the Buick—everyone in their correct bodies now—and headed back toward Dead End Row. Marcus sat in the passenger seat, still patting himself occasionally to make sure he was real.
"You know the worst part was?" he said quietly.
"What?" Vida asked, adjusting her sun hat.
"Dale was right. We could just kill him. And we did."
From the backseat, Chen's corpse-voice rasped out. "Technically, Little Tony killed you."
"Not helping, Chen."
But despite everything–the body swapping, the temporary death, the malfunctioning defibrillator—Marcus found himself smiling.
It was just another day at DEAD END ROW