|  Here's the second part.
I'll only do three.
2.
I leave the hearse parked in an empty Tybee Island First Baptist Church parking lot on Butler Street.
They’ll come looking for it soon.
There’s no reason to suspect me in the theft as technically I’m still lying on a metal table in the Southeast Regional Medical Center morgue.
My toe tag says so.
As for home, I’ve only been dead since last night.
The police will try to locate a next of kin somewhere and finding none other than an ex-wife who would just as soon not hear anything more about my misadventures, and who might actually find some solace in my demise – I’ve certainly given her plenty enough reason over the years to want to dance on my grave – they will commit those earthly remains they believe to be mine to a pauper’s grave.
I suddenly feel sorry for Mr. Phelps, being the object of my ex-wife’s affections and having to spend eternity resting beneath a headstone bearing my name.
The police will come soon, if they haven’t tried my address already.
Finding it deserted it will be awhile before they come back.
That still gives me time to get home, find a change of clothes, and clear out some things.
The only problem with that course of action is where will I go?
The thought did occur to me that I could just stay here and handle the authorities myself if they come back.
After all, no one would suspect me of being anything else than I appear to be – Trammell Stark’s roommate.
I am lying on a metal slab downtown.
I can answer their questions, become the next of kin and end any prying into my affairs while they try to locate someone willing to stand up for me.
That someone doesn’t exist.
The burden would ultimately fall to my kids I guess, and I don’t want to dump that in their laps. I figure
I’ve dumped enough there already.
Besides, they haven’t seen me in more than six years.
I’m not sure they’d even know me.
Or care, given all that’s happened.
The dead congregate among the perimeter shadows of the church parking lot as if offended by the security lighting placed about the church property. The light keeps them at bay and this is supposed to be the place that welcomes them with open arms.
They come here seeking comfort.
Reassurance perhaps.
Answers for sure because they’ve died, and for them, there is no Other Side.
No Beyond.
No Heaven.
Just this.
The walk from the First Baptist Church parking lot is just a couple blocks down Butler Street home and I’m not sure the police will draw any connecting conclusions to my residence, the hearse and my lying in the same hospital morgue from where it was stolen other than a thin coincidence.
I’m not sure they’ll even notice.
Whoever investigates the hearse theft won’t necessarily be the same party that comes knocking on my front door looking for my next of kin.
I smile at the thought – I could be my own gay lover.
That would set my ex-wife on end for sure.
A Cheshire grin moon smiles good-bye to the night, perched above the tree line to the west as the first hint of dawn bleeds into the night sky to the east with the gradual fade of black to gray. A damp cold breeze sweeps up the shore from out of the south. It carries the scent of rain coming in off the ocean, pushed up the beach by the line of anvil shaped cloud towers stretching from dawn’s fading stain in the east to the Cheshire grin wedge westward.
The damp cold tickles a chill up from the base of my spine.
I'm tired.
I need to clear my head -- not an easy task given the events of the past few hours.
I can still hear the shrill whine of the bone saw and see the harsh glint of chrome from the blade hovering just inches from my eyes.
And that didn’t happen.
It had been a dream.
That I woke up on a metal table, naked, a tag tied to my toe identifying me as a member of the no-longer-living and the artwork stitching up from my stomach outlining where the bone saw would eventually go apparently wasn’t nightmare enough.
My mind felt it necessary to conjure something up that was even more horrific.
Maybe this wasn’t so much a nightmare as it was a premonition – one possible reality awaiting me if I didn’t move it and fast.
This has been some night.
Waking up in a morgue – twice, no less – is not something you do every day.
I went almost six hours without breathing.
Am I dead?
Traffic at this time of the night and morning is limited to the occasional passing car. Keeping to the middle of Butler Street, I veer into the lane of an oncoming car just to prove to myself that I’m not invisible.
The toot of a horn and the swerving of headlights says I am still of flesh and bone.
So I’m not dead.
Neither, it seems, am I alive.
I can feel the dull gray-eyed stares of the dead peering curiously at me from the deeper shadows of the trees and quiet front lawns of the homes and buildings lining Butler Street.
They know I can see them.
They know I am aware of them.
But they won’t venture into the light to satisfy any lingering curiosity or yearning.
Which is fine by me.
I don’t care much for the dark anymore.
What I can see in the darkness doesn’t bother me as much as what I can’t.
I keep to the center of the street, within the amber cones of light thrown by the overhead street lamps, running at a slow jog.
I want to go home.
I want a shower.
I want to wash the stink of the river out of my hair.
I want to scrub away any trace of the red-stitched lines splicing my chest.
I want to fill the cold emptiness yawning in the pit of my stomach where my soul used to reside.
I want coffee.
I have to focus.
My thoughts.
Everything.
I have questions in need of answers and if I focus my thoughts, I’ll get them.
I can see everything… except the six hours between heartbeats tonight.
And when I see everything, I see it all at once.
Everything.
In disjointed fragments, without rhyme or reason.
Or meaning.
Which is why I have to focus.
That much I learned quickly.
Time is the here and now.
No more yesterdays, todays or tomorrows.
Just now.
Everything is the present.
What has happened.
What is happening.
And what will happen.
What I do with this… the rest – what I’ve learned
I’ll just take as it comes.
One day at a time.
One minute at a time.
One heartbeat at a time.
I keep a key under the third brick framing a front flowerbed that’s more crushed shell than anything growing. Some boxwood shrubbery that the landlord hired a landscaper to plant a few years back has morphed into a somewhat geometrically aesthetic hedge.
The key fits the back door on the first floor in the carport.
Everything here within proximity to the beach is built on stilts in case that one hurricane does eventually come. I’m close enough to the beach to be able to hear the steady rush of the ocean surf emptying its load on the hard packed sand at the waterline so I don’t mind the stilts.
Flickers of lightning track uneven lines to the top of the sky and far to the south the distant rumble of thunder voices its general displeasure.
Palm fronds hiss in a steady sigh pushed by the subtle whisper of the wind.
I push open the back door and step into a stranger’s house.
I don’t recognize any of the furnishings as mine at first.
After waking up on that metal table even breathing seems alien right now.
Wedges of light slice through open curtains and I pause a moment at the door stoop to give my eyes a chance to adjust to the deeper darkness inside.
A tickle of anxiety pulls at the pit of my stomach.
I don’t feel safe here.
I don’t feel “home.”
I’ll never feel completely safe.
Not after tonight.
I was murdered earlier.
I was thrown 185-feet off the span of a bridge into the Savannah River and left to drown in case I’d been lucky enough to survive the fall.
Apparently I survived both.
But not without some lingering scars and …
Complications.
I get reacquainted with my home.
The furnishings are Spartan.
Typical late forties single male.
Mismatched chairs circle a Formica kitchen table picked up at a yard sale once upon a time.
A sofa that might have belonged to a great-Aunt sits against one wall.
A small television pocked with assorted stacks of DVD cases, most of them empty occupies the other.
The artwork on the walls range from early-married-now-discarded Colonial prints to old sports memorabilia long ago exiled to the back of the hall linen closet now liberated with the signing of the divorce decree.
There is a computer workstation set against the far wall.
The monitor scrolls through a screen saver of my recent life – photographs I’d taken either for work or personal reasons that were downloaded here.
The faces in the photos are strangers to me.
Including my own.
First things first though, a shower and some fresh clothes.
And coffee.
Strong, rich, black and exquisitely bitter coffee.
I’d opt for that over a stiff drink.
I want to be alert, not drowsy.
Drowsiness carries the dreams in its arms and erodes the focus.
When the focus erodes, time unleashes a bombardment, shards of shattered glass falling like rain, and I see everything at once.
For now, that’s more than I can handle.
I shuffle off to the bathroom to the gurgle of brewing coffee, peel off clothes that will wind up in the trash and hopefully never be traced back here.
After a long and scalding hot shower I wipe away the condensation film in the mirror and trade long looks with my reflection.
Six hours without breathing can leave its mark on a man’s soul.
That is betrayed in the stranger’s expression in the mirror.
The eyes after all are the windows to the soul, aren’t they?
And mine carry a hollow, haunted look.
Purplish craters encircle the eyes, highlighted by d
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