the curse of the undead king by Adrian Sobol
In another life, I burned all my bridges for money. In another life, I owned a boat in a landlocked country. In another, my regrets were essentially the same. In another, two twin boys performed surgery on me (their third and therefore most evil twin). They closed me up and buried my organs where I would never think to look. But I looked. It didn’t end well. For me, or them, or civilization, really, in the long run. Listen. I’m not taking credit. I know how this goes. You open one wrong tomb, and that’s it. You’ve unleashed the Curse of the Undead King, Jeremy, crowned at 2009’s infamous homecoming dance. You remember, I know, how we carried him in our arms, passed him from table to table, anointed his body with bottles of smirnoff ice smuggled in from our cars. His handsome mouth, a lavish boxed-in canyon, echoed back our laughter. It’s a shame what happened to him, there at the end. How no one considered how much confetti would kill a man. But I try not to think of that. Instead, I think of Betty, her dress, how it lit up there in the hallway, against the burning dancefloor. As paramedics rushed in around us, she held my hand for the first and last time, and promised me that if we could get through this, we would get through anything.