Mobile App

As a semi-retired software engineer and an often hated critic of the many apps that come from overseas, especially from the Asian theater, I still receive my share of ‘try this and tell me what you think of it,’ requests.

Some are so stupid that I send a polite email to the developer saying ‘no thanks‘. Others, like the makers of the mobile app, ‘Yeshi,’ I promise a quick spin around the Superhighway.

Because I am into slang words, I know that ‘Yeshi’ is a phrase meaning that a dead person can’t until rest until the circumstances of their death changes. Call me intrigued as I install the app to my phone and touch start the moment it is uploaded.

Where I am from that moment on…well, let’s jus’ say that my last detailed memory is of sitting on my back porch, in my favorite, well-faded University of Nevada-Reno t-shirt, drinking a can of Hamm’s beer and smoking a Camel Gold. That’ll change, too.

In an altered, but very familiar reality, I’ve returned to my childhood home, a home that hasn’t been a part of my life since I was 20. I’m parked across the street, the nose of my truck pointed in the wrong direction as I sit, observing the old place.

In the drive is my old man’s 1964 Chevy pickup. There’s also the gold-colored Opel station wagon, that I still think of it as an embarrassing piece of shit. In front of the house, by the sidewalk is my 1968 Dodge Charger, one very cool car and chick-magnet.

“Odd,” I think, “This is exactly how it looked when I last saw the place.”

By now I’m out of my truck and walking across the street and somehow I already know what I will find beyond that unlocked door.

The first time, if that really is the case, I joined four faceless, shapeless figures around our old oak table, the same table we had all through my childhood. At least three of the people stood on one side of the table, with a fourth standing at what I concluded to be the head of the table.

On the table is a standard sized cake, like the one my mother used to bake for each of our birthdays, with white moldy frosting and several candles, too many for me to count. Looking the cake, candles unlit, it begins to heave up, and then it erupts with maggots.

These maggots crawl over the table in every direction and quickly turn into flies and soon the entire house is clouded by the black, buzzing and biting pests and I’m forced to wake up. By this time, I’m sweaty, chilled and panting like I jus’ ran the 100-yard-dash and I’m on my bed now , with no recollection of how I got here.

But this most recent slip into this alternate reality comes with out my having to use YeshiApp. It also comes with three new features.

The first is the sight as seen through the sliding glass door of the old rusty green and red swing set which is standing idle in the backyard. The other thing, the more profound thing, the thing that takes my breath away are the people, dead members of my family.

“Hi,” my brother says to me. I know it’s him because he’s the one with the severe damage to his head, from where he blow the back of his skull out with a shotgun. I find him the most difficult to look at, as he’s missing a part of his tongue, several teeth and his eyes are crossed, but outward, as if he were trying to look at his ears, which one hangs loosely from his scalp.

Mom is rail thin, a near-skeleton, like she was when the cancer took her life. I was with her the early morning she stopped breathing and I had to wrestle dad to prevent him from doing CPR on her, which would have been against her wishes.

“I’m doing fine,” she says taking my left hand in hers. It’s the same words she used to say as she lay in bed and in pain, after the hospice gal told us her ending was near. What remains of her lips are a waxy-yellow and tattered.

My father is there as well. He smells of Vitalis hair tonic, automobile grease and burnt tobacco, but seems genuinely happy to see me as he grabs my left shoulder, giving it a squeeze like he used to, before his third and final heart attack.

“Let’s go work on your car,” he wheezes breathlessly, “When we’re done here.” His broken nose, from his semi-pro boxing career, has fallen off, leaving a triangular cavity between and below his still, blue eyes.

“Sorry, I wasn’t here to…” I start.

“No worries,” he interrupts.

Then there’s Sissy, who is standing between them, smiling like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, but not disappearing. I hadn’t seen her with both of her legs and absent her wheelchair since I was in my early 20’s.

“Told you I almost as tall as you,” she giggles. I can see the veins in her neck where they collapsed and have left deep inverted lines in her skin. Her heart had failed after so many years of unhealthy living.

My eldest sister isn’t here. She’s still alive.

That’s the third thing — and it hits me hard, like a punch in the gut: “Does this mean I’m not?”

Then it also occurs to me that the kitchen window is open. Has it always been open?

No. The flies would have found their way outside, had it been.

I think about jumping out of it.

Not a far jump, we’re on the ground floor of a single floor house. As I make up my mind to do this – a raven lights on the sill and begins pacing back and forth.

Then they join each other in singing to the tune of ‘Happy birthday to you…,’ “The show must go on, the show must go on…” and as if on cue, maggots burp up like a water fountain in an Esther Williams movie, from the rotted cake and begin to turn into flies.

The raven is enjoying the feast of a lifetime as it squawks, “Ye-Shi,” between beak fulls.

As I look around in terror once again, I see that I’m clutching my cellphone in my right hand, the speaker is on and I can hear what sounds like Asian coming from it. One male voice says, “Ye,” the other, a woman says, “Shi.”

“Yes-yes,” I understand, one says in Korean, the other Chinese. I’m awake, but can’t close the app.