Suicide Souls Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Reviews

  Dedication

  Chapter

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Pandamoon Publishing

  SUICIDE SOULS

  by Penni Jones

  © 2021 by Penni Jones

  This book is a work of creative fiction that uses actual publicly known events, situations, and locations as background for the storyline with fictional embellishments as creative license allows. Although the publisher has made every effort to ensure the grammatical integrity of this book was correct at press time, the publisher does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. At Pandamoon, we take great pride in producing quality works that accurately reflect the voice of the author. All the words are the author’s alone.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pandamoon Publishing. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  www.pandamoonpublishing.com

  Jacket design and illustrations © Pandamoon Publishing

  Art Direction by Don Kramer: Pandamoon Publishing

  Editing by Zara Kramer, Rachel Schoenbauer, and Heather Stewart: Pandamoon Publishing

  Pandamoon Publishing and the portrayal of a panda and a moon are registered trademarks of Pandamoon Publishing.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

  Edition: 1, version 1.00

  ISBN 13:

  Dedication

  To Jeff, wherever you are.

  Losing a loved one is always difficult. But in my experience, grief related to suicide stands alone in its specificity. Even if there were signs, the death is a shock. Every person close to the deceased feels implicated in their death, some only slightly, and some carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. Grief is never linear, but grief following suicide is a random gut-punch every few days, weeks, or months for years. Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. There are a multitude of contributing factors. But if we destigmatize mental health struggles, lives will be saved.

  Please, if you are in crisis, call someone. You are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All calls are confidential. 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

  SUICIDE SOULS

  Chapter 1

  There’s no reason to second guess my decision to kill myself. It’s too late for that. I could have tried to stick it out, taken some meds, talked to a therapist, started meditating, and all that shit. My increased self-awareness is the best thing to come out of all of this. All of this being my suicide attempt, which was completely successful because that’s the kind of person I am. I was. Whatever.

  I’m dead now, and I’m visiting my loved ones as they grieve. It’s a part of the process. For them, for me, for everyone.

  You know when someone you love commits suicide, and you feel sad about it completely out of the blue, and it feels like someone just punched you in the stomach even though you were dealing with it okay just a few days before? That’s part of the process. Suicide souls have to watch their friends and family grieve in order to move on. It’s punishment for us, but also for our loved ones, which is shitty. And if they aren’t grieving for us when we visit, we have to wait until we observe their grief before we can move on to the next loved one, until we run out of people we left behind and start the search for a vapid body to inhabit and start our new lives.

  It’s some serious shit. I know.

  I’m sure finding a vapid body will be its own set of problems, or maybe it won’t because most of humanity is an empty pile of garbage, but I won’t know for sure until I get through the long list of loved ones. There are so many more loved ones than I had considered. It’s a funny thing, how many people love you, yet I felt so utterly alone that I thought my death would be no big deal for anyone.

  There are no markers of time in the afterlife. Or spirit world. Or purgatory or Heaven, or whatever. Nobody has given me a handbook to tell me the official title. I just get bits of information from my mentor Edgar, who appears when he’s not busy haunt-stalking whichever Jonas brother it is who’s the hot one. There are clocks, but what good is it to know what time it is when you don’t know what year you’re in? The most disorienting is there is no waking up for breakfast or turning in for bed. No waking up to a new day. Though my concept of a new day had been exhausted long before I offed myself.

  I don’t remember much about my last seconds on earth. Probably because I passed out from the booze and benzos. I sort of remember the thought process that brought me to the big sleep on my rumpled navy blue comforter.

  Did my mom wish that I had left the bed tidier? Why yes, she did. I heard her say so while I waited for her to cry.

  The time lapse between my suicide and my arrival in the afterlife is unclear, but it really doesn’t matter. I laid down in my messy bed and the next thing I knew I was in a waiting room. Such a cliché, right? Everywhere we go, we wait. My last boyfriend, Greg, the one who’s also dead, told me once that we spend about six months of our lives waiting at traffic lights. He used that as an excuse to stop driving and take his bike everywhere. I know that seems like a good idea, but he arrived everywhere smelling like exhaust and armpit.

  Unidentifiable music played in the waiting room. It sounded like the longest piano recital in the world, playing maybe a collection of hymns mixed with showtunes. There were three other people in the room but none of us spoke.

  A handsome Black man in a timeless dark suit opened a door and said, “Naomi,” with the boom of a microphone. I stood and followed him to a small office. The door closed behind us without either of us touching it, like a prison door. So I’ve heard.

  “My name is Edgar.” He extended his hand and we went through the motions of shaking without actually touching. “I’ll be your mentor through grief watch.”

  That’s how it works here. There’s no actual contact, but we hang on to our routines anyway. Even things like sitting and hugging. It’s weird at first but you get used to it.

  “Naomi,” I said, even though he already knew my name.

  “As you may have figured out, you’re dead.”

  I looked down to my cleavage. I wore a red stripper dress and platform heels to the party. My nails were lacquered in gold. Fortunately, I took off the shoes before I killed myself. But I was still in the stripper dress. I almost never dressed like that. Why did I choose to die in such a tacky dress?

  “Part of the process, I’m afraid. You’ll be able to change later.”

  “Did you read my mind?” The thoug
ht filled me with a new type of terror.

  “No. I just saw the look on your face, and I can see the tragic dress.”

  “I know it’s bad. But ‘tragic?’”

  “Yes.” Edgar nods his head once. “Okay, listen up. We have a lot to cover. It’s January so we’re at top volume. I have a lot of souls to process.

  “First comes grief watch. You’ll be sent from loved one to loved one to witness their grieving. Consider it afterlife voyeurism, and everyone must do it. You’ll have certain tools at your disposal…”

  “Can I at least write some of this stuff down?” I asked as he rattled off stuff about emitting scents and some vague shit about manipulating energy. I wanted to ask if haunting and watching were the same thing, but I was nearing overwhelm and didn’t want more information.

  “You won’t need to. I’ll check in with you soon.” He smiled in a way that wasn’t quite reassuring enough.

  I felt something pull at me from all directions. The room swirled into blues, reds, greens, yellows, grays, and other colors I didn’t have time to identify. There was a “whoosh” sound and I was in my mother’s bedroom. That was where my grief watch began. I don’t know how long ago that was.

  * * *

  I’m in Jamie’s shiny new bungalow now where he lives with his shiny wife, Laney, and their shiny new baby even though he told me he didn’t want kids.

  Jamie hooked up with Laney only a few months after we broke up. They got married about two years after the last time Jamie and I had crazy hot drunken monkey sex in his dingy apartment over one of the few bars in Little Rock that stays open past 2 a.m. His place always smelled of cigarettes and most nights the music rose from the floor like smoke from a grease fire.

  My best friend, Eliza, came to my place with assorted chocolate truffles and cheap bubbly to break the news about Laney’s pregnancy. That about a year after their wedding. That baby is probably about six months old now, judging by the fat rolls. That’s how I know that it’s been around one year now since I swallowed a fistful of pills and settled in to the horizontal Hilton, and no, I don’t mean Paris.

  Laney’s pregnancy sent me on a spiral. The stereotypical depressed stuff: forgetting to shower, eating potato chips for breakfast, carving “we should all just die” into a bathroom stall with a nail file. And no, not because Jamie was having a baby with someone else. Even though Jamie and I had been in love at one point, I had already loved and lost someone else by then. It was because Jamie found someone else to be a worthy vessel for his child. Inferiority slunk down my throat and into my stomach and seeped from my pores.

  Honestly, I wasn’t mother material. I was a mess. Obviously, right? No one who has their shit together ends up as a suicide soul.

  Even my sister thought I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. She stood in her kitchen with her hands on her hips right next to the refrigerator covered in shitty kid art and told me the kids were going to someone from their church if she and her husband both died in a car accident or plane crash or mass shooting.

  “Seriously, Naomi. Don’t act hurt. It’s that we just can’t trust you to raise the kids in our faith. And you party too much.” She smiled sweetly and added, “You really wouldn’t want all this anyway, would you?”

  “Do you mean the paunch and the floppy tits?”

  She didn’t think that was funny. I could tell by the way she threw a sippy cup at my head and told me to get out of her house.

  But no, my lack of maternal qualities is not why I did it. I was sad and lonely to the point of being a rom-com level cliché. I’m sure that clinical depression played a role as well, but I self-medicated so much I honestly didn’t know how I felt anymore.

  And there was Greg, the last boy I loved. But I can’t really blame it on him. I honestly thought if I killed myself fast enough, I could catch up to him. Silly me. I shouldn’t have been doing any thinking after all that vodka. But it was so hard not to blame myself for what happened to him.

  Not that I worked out all those issues when I was alive. I’ve had a lot of time to sit around and reflect lately. And I still haven’t caught up to Greg.

  So here I am in Jamie’s bedroom, waiting for him to grieve.

  It’s boring as fuck.

  Jamie is a stay-at-home dad because Laney is an attorney. Jamie is a sculptor, so it made sense that he would be the one to stay home with their shiny baby son, who is currently napping, as is Jamie.

  Jamie is gorgeous, as much as I hate to admit it. He’s the type of guy who awakens a woman’s ovaries and makes them scream, “Over here! We need your broad-shouldered sperm all up in our shit!” His long eyelashes flutter as he dreams, and I’ve had all the watching him I can take.

  The urge to slap him overtakes me, and I have even less control over my impulses now that I’m dead, so I do it. Hard. Right across his stinking beautiful face.

  What I didn’t know is that he would feel it.

  That’s a new one on me. I’ve tried touching loved ones to console them, to hug them, to wipe tears, but he was the first slap. And there was skin-to-skin contact. There was even a “thwap” noise. It feels fantastic to touch skin, to slap skin. I try to gasp and really wish I could.

  Jamie jerks awake, and I slap him again to see if it works. But it doesn’t. My hand goes directly through his head just like my other attempts at touching.

  Emitting scent is a gift bestowed on us to help us move this grieving shit along. I emit the scent people remember me by: Snuggle fabric softener (I dug the bear, shut up) and menthol cigarettes.

  Tears spring from Jamie’s brown eyes, turning those long eyelashes into tiny, clumpy strands.

  “Naomi,” he whispers.

  I know if normal human emotions were still my thing, I would be into some heavy regret right now. I would feel that tug from knowing it’s my fault that he is crying and wishing I could make that not be so. I recognize those feelings, but they don’t ring true. I don’t want to change the past, because useless yearning is reserved for the living. Can’t say that I miss it.

  Don’t get me wrong. It sucks to watch friends and family cry because of something I did. But it’s a different sort of shitty feeling. Especially since I need them to grieve so the process can continue as it’s supposed to. Maybe Jamie is the last one and I will be able to move on to look for a body.

  We have to learn how to stick it out (i.e. live until we die from forces out of our control) in our new bodies or we face darkness. My understanding is that it’s not Hell, it’s just nothing. Non-existence, lights out, dunzo.

  Jamie picks up his phone and pushes some buttons. That James Blunt song oozes from the shitty phone speaker and he starts bawling. It’s a pretty douchey move considering I hate that song. I wish I could slap him again.

  Jamie’s baby wakes up crying. Jamie gets out of bed and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. He sniffs a couple of times and leaves the room.

  I brace myself for the teleportation and feel the now familiar pull. It’s sort of like a vacuum pulling at my entire body. It’s not unpleasant, and I kind of enjoy trying to make out the colors. Maybe this grief watch shit is finally over.

  Chapter 2

  I’m sitting at a small round table now, in a room that looks like a coffee shop. There are people, or souls, I guess, sitting at tables but no one has anything to eat or drink in front of them. We have empty coffee cups in front of us. Some tables have red trays with paper plates and napkins. If an existential crisis was a food court, it would be this place.

  Edgar appears at the chair across from me. His kind face is always a haven, like going home to visit your parents when you’re in college.

  “Naomi,” Edgar smiles and puts his hands over mine. It’s not like skin-to-skin contact, just a slight temperature change.

  “Hi, Edgar. Am I finished with the grieving family bullshit?”

  “Well,” he pulls his hands away, “mostly.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You have completed
your grief watch faster than anyone I’ve ever mentored.” He straightens his tie and sits up in his chair.

  “I’m an over-achiever.” My mentor knows this about me. He can’t be surprised by my tenacity.

  “Sure, you are.” Edgar pats my hand. It feels warm, cold, warm, cold. “The issue is that you still aren’t showing any remorse.”

  If I could breathe, my breath would be knocked right out of me. “I thought we couldn’t feel remorse here. Just kind of sad or something.”

  “The amount of remorse you feel is directly related to the person you were. If you were an average person who felt the average amount of guilt, you would have felt remorse at the beginning, and you would have come to terms with it before the process was over. If you were a sociopath when you were alive, the hope is that you will eventually feel some remorse before the process ends.” He crosses his arms over his chest.

  “You’re saying I was a sociopath?” My urge to slap is back, but I know it’s not worth the effort since there won’t be any skin-to-skin contact.

  “You really don’t know that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You were best friends with your cousin Ruthie Mae from birth until you graduated high school. You dumped her during your first year of college because she wouldn’t stop wearing camouflage. As soon as you got out of your tiny town and met new people, she become nothing to you.”

  Is everyone in the afterlife this judgmental? “We grew apart. So?”

  “The ‘so’ is that you never felt the least bit guilty about abandoning her even when she got so depressed, she drove her car into a levee ditch.”

  “She didn’t die or anything.”

  “She was in physical therapy for six months, Naomi.” Edgar leans forward and clasps his hands together. I guess old habits die hard.