The Mall Reapers

by Daniel Roop

The second time I died, when I was fifteen, I didn’t. Mama and I had been arguing about the usual things, including my black eye shadow and mascara and how it “made me look awful pretty for a corpse.” I’d stormed off to my room in the back of our trailer in a huff, and she just stayed in the living room and drank coffee and smoked at the rickety brown table next to the stove so the vent would siphon off the smell. I threw myself on my bed and pulled the covers over my head, trying not to smudge the eye shadow. In fairness to her, I did cake it on back then. I laid there and listened to Concrete Blonde and The Cure and mumbled the lyrics into my black comforter. I was pretty dramatic in those days, and that along with the Crow’d up outfits didn’t help me fit in much in our little town in Scruggs County, Tennessee. I only knew three things for sure: I hated my life, I hated this place, and I was never, ever going to get out of here. This smoky trailer, this rutted gravel road, this hemmed-in Appalachian horizon was the only one I would ever see. So, I butchered a few more songs, earnestly at least, and then Mom called, “Elsie!”—it’s hard to be goth when you’re named Elsie—“Elsie, come look at this!” (Continue Reading…)