Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kate Anderson
- Language: English
- Genre:Paranormal & Urban Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
dead InsIde counts too
A pack of skeletons jog down the middle of the street, all dangling plastic
bones and glow-in-the-dark tutus. The runners in the Skele-10K clatter past
me as I walk toward White Haven, New Mexico’s annual Festival of Death.
Today is the kind of fall day where I shiver in the shade and sweat in the
sun, with a sky so blue that it makes me blink. Dry cottonwood leaves rasp
across the road, and the air is thin and crisp; it smells like rotting apples and
falling leaves and smoldering wood, a combination of dying things that I
inexplicably want to capture in a scented candle. Like all North American
basic white girls, I have a sudden urge to put on a chunky scarf and ankle
boots and carry a punny mug with me everywhere I go (Zero Fox Given).
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The town square looks like it’s straight out of a Tim Burton film: skullshaped streetlights draped in black bunting, cast-iron cauldrons on each
corner overflowing with black velvet petunias and creeping, veined ivy. A
long line twists around a hearse parked next to the cemetery wall. Food to Die
For is scrawled on the sign in dripping red letters. This apparent health code
violation doesn’t stop tourists from waiting an hour for loaded Gravedigger
Tots and Death by Chocolate Cake.
“There you are!” Dad calls. He’s setting out Styrofoam blocks and dull butter
knives at our family’s booth: Morana Memorials Carve Your Own
Tombstones. At the end of the weekend, the best one wins a tiny headstone
that he shapes out of scrap marble and engraves with the winner’s name. “I’ve
been here for an hour already. Grab me more knives, okay?”
I tap the badge pinned over my heart. It’s a hard, plastic cartoony tombstone
with HERE LIES OLIVE engraved on it.
“I would, but I take my civic duty very seriously,” I say, even though my
track record would beg to differ. “I have to help at the Junior Reapers
information booth.”
Mom and Dad were thrilled when I joined the city’s youth council. Let’s just
say community involvement has never really been my thing.
But Junior Reapers has its perks.
“Oh, of course!” A faint smile tugs at Dad’s lips. “Go, go! Enjoy your day!”
He waves me off, turning to a bossy-looking woman who’s eyeing her watch
like she’s running out of time. At the festival or in her life, I don’t know, but
she looks like the kind of woman who doesn’t make a distinction.
“Lolly!” Dad calls after me. “Do you have your EpiPen?”
It’s been two years, two months, and nineteen days since I bit into a crab
rangoon and almost died. Now Dad never fails to remind me to take my
EpiPen everywhere, even though a shellfish allergy isn’t like a bee allergy. It’s
not like a shrimp can swoop out of the sky and ram itself down my throat. I
can just, you know, not eat any shellfish. Still, I pat my skull-shaped purse to
make sure the EpiPen is in its zippered pouch, then roll my eyes at him. “Yes.
And stop calling me Lolly!”
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