“He bought her six new dresses, and I brought
her goddamn cat back from the dead, so
who loves her more?”
--Pet Sematary

     The third worst day in Stoffen Cale’s life was the day the doctors said they could bring his daughter back.
      The second worst day, of course, was not the day he had chipped his front tooth in third grade, not even the day that he caught his wife eating lunch with another man, her hand near his crotch.
      The second worst day of his life was the day Phaedra Cale died.
      He remembered that day vividly, almost to the point where he could recall the taste of the hospital’s bland coffee. He recalled his wife’s blotchy face, staring at the public access television show, and he could even summon the metallic and cold light from the panels above.
      And then the amplified sound of the doors to the Intensive Care Unit opening, and then Dr. Bradford, his eyes a brilliant ice blue, and then his voice, and for a moment Stoffen had been blasted to the not-so-distant past, when he had taken Phaedra to see the classic Star Wars, and suddenly Dr. Bradford’s voice was that of the ill-destined Darth Vader:
      Mr. Cale. Ms. Cale. I’m sorry. We did all we could...but she’s gone.
       Stoffen had sat, unbelievingly, and he stared at his hands; he did not realize that he was sobbing hard, crying like a little girl, nor that his wife was screaming beside him. But he did look up in time to see the good doctor embracing his wife in comfort, something that he was unable to do himself.
      And there was Livana, nearly shrieking her sobs, beating the doctor’s back as she wailed:
      No, no, she can’t be dead! She can’t be dead! I just saw her yesterday! She cannot be dead!
      And then the clincher: She can’t be dead, Mhark; I love her!
      Lavina had wanted to see Phaedra, to touch her cooling body, as if to console herself, but while she sat in the good doctor’s arms, sobbing, wailing, screeching, he convinced her not to, and while Lavina was using her satin shirt to wipe her nose, Dr. Bradford gave her a sedative.
      And then the good doctor had taken him aside to tell him that life would go on, that Phaedra was no longer suffering, that she was with God now, and through all his grief, there came a rage in Stoffen because this good doctor had never suffered at all, would never know pain at all because he was a millionaire and he always got what he wanted.
      Except Lavina. But that was a whole other pot of fish, boys and girls, thought Stoffen, now as he sat in the good doctor Mhark Bradford’s office, remembering a scant three days ago, and grimaced in agony. He was sitting beside his wife; Lavina, even in her intense sorrow, was as beautiful as ever, wearing a silver dress far too short, but this was the first sign that something was wrong to Stoffen.
      No doubt about it, something is up.
      He wore, however, a decent black suit, complete with matching shoes and watch and thinning hair and blotchy eyes and red face.
      And the good doctor, Mhark Bradford, Dr. Old-Boyfriend-In-College, Mr. Perfect, why he was wearing a charcoal gray suit, complete with shiny Rolex.
      He’s got my wife.
      The thought jerked him awake, and away, momentarily, from his sorrow.
      Lavina? She’s still my wife.
      And your daughter was your daughter too, until a brain tumor got her, eh?
 And then of course, Mr. Lovely Bradford, whose face was clear, spoke.
      “Mr. Cale. Mrs. Cale, Let me first say how sorry I am.”
      Stoffen stared at his chapped red hands.
      This can’t be happening, he told himself. It’s nothing more than a bad dream, and soon I’ll wake up at home, with Lavina telling the maid not to char the bacon, and Phaedra will come running down the stairs, wanting nothing more than orange juice with a side of toast, unbuttered.
      She’ll be alive, sneered that disgusting part of him which had compared adultery to a brain tumor.
      If only, thought Stoffen Cale, as no doubt countless other parents had once thought, or still did. If only I’d spent more time with her. Worked puzzles, walked the dog, gone to church…if only I’d stayed home more often to play with her. If only I had one more chance. One more. That’s all I ask for, God. Please. Just one, and I promise I’ll donate my life savings to the church. I’ll give everything I own to the poor, follow the Messiah throughout life without my family…just give me my daughter back.
      “—even with all of today’s technology—“ Bradford. Ah, there he was again.
 Oh, come now, snapped that sick part again. God does NOT take a child and then give her back. If science can’t do it, then faith alone can’t either. Even if you were a Charlie Churchman, she would be dead now. Praying to a deity you never believed in until a week ago will not change this any more than Mr. College Sweetie Pie will.
      “—there was nothing we as doctors could do for her.”
      And Lazarus…loose him from his grave clothes and let him go.
      Let him go.
      “But as scientists, there is.”
      In this world we’ve made, we can use heat sensors to match a rapist to a victim; we can project realities into classrooms; we can force a brain to operate after days...of.
      His brain, or perhaps his sanity, shrieked.
      Then the outside world fell away, and when he opened his eyes, he saw not the doctor, but a newspaper headline, dated over three weeks ago, when Phaedra had been alive and kicking and eating her unbuttered toast precociously.
      From the New Times Sine Papers: Doctors Discover Perfect Cell Regeneration.
      He resurfaced into the real world, into the world where Phaedra Cale had clung to life forever and still died, her eyes rolling in addiction.
     “What…” gasped Stoffen.
      Bradford glanced at him, folded his hands over his desk in a steeple form.
      “What did you say?” garbled Stoffen, his throat raw.
      The tears seeped out again, and, his hands under the desk, he found himself removing his golden ring of wedded bliss, and plop, it fell with a quiet noise into the charcoal carpet.
      “Mr. Cale,” said the damned doctor,  “we can bring her back. Do you understand?”
 He stared at the man dumbly, a bull before the slaughter, aware of the stench of blood but uncomprehending of its significance.
 “We,” whispered Lavina, “can have her back. Do you know what that means!”
 She spun to the father of her dead child. “We can bring her back, Stoffen!”
      Then the words hit him, and he sat up straight, as though Bradford had reached under the table and squeezed his scrotum.
      “Alive?” he managed to creak out after a decade, after a lifetime. “You can…bring her back? Make her alive?”
      Bradford began to smile again.
      “But,” wheezed Stoffen, feeling his chest tighten, “you’re not Christ. “You,” he creaked, “are a liar to a childless man.”
      “Mr. Cale,” said Bradford, “have you ever heard of Eternia Productions?”
      Mr. Cale shook his head numbly.
      “What about Patricia Velmont?”
      He nodded this time; she had been in the news. As the seventh victim of a serial rapist and killer, her name had flashed once in the news.
      “I tell you,” said Dr. Bradford carefully, “that she is as alive as we are today.”
      Bradford smiled. “No doubt you heard about her injuries. She was slashed open from neck to vagina.”
      “But I tell you now that she is currently watching a story-opera on the telescreen. Alive. Eating. Breathing.”
      “And Phaedra can be the same way.”
      “What.” Stoffen was dead himself.
     “Phaedra had a brain tumor, Mr. Cale, as you well know,” hissed Bradford. “But only part of her brain was affected. Her heart is still in prime condition. Her liver, kidneys, everything else, perfect.”
      “Half her brain was gone,” moaned Cale, but without emotion. “We saw the X-rays. It was just eaten.”
      “We can regenerate that,” was the reply. “Mr. Cale, the medical profession has progressed beyond death-“
      No. No. No, it’s just a lie, just a ploy, nothing but...
 “-and the Grim Reaper is no longer to be feared-“
      But, demanded a wily part of his mind, what if…
      Should they, you fool! Do you not remember the tears, the drugs, the pain? What if she comes back…as a zombie? A vegetable? An addict to all that cocaine the docs forced into her frail body, fresh before puberty?
     Do you not remember her agony, the needles, the pain in her eyes? How she begged and pleaded before speech was gone, before sight was gone? How she wept until her eyes had rotted away in her skull because that damned tumor was cancerous?
      Will you bring her back, a freak in this world? Everyone in her world, her teachers, friends, family, know she is dead. To have her return…to present a walking vegetable with rotted eyes at the next family reunion…
     “Vegetable,” he heard himself grumble and groan. “Vege-“
     “No,” snapped Bradford, as if the very idea was idiocy. “Never. We regenerate from the surviving half- and there never was any cancer there, Mr. Cale.”
 “Eyes,” Cale gasped.
      “We have cloned eyes on hand,” said Bradford.
 And then that struck him too, and Cale stiffened in his chair, frozen in rigor mortis.
      “That’s illegal,” he wheezed, as fresh tears rose, “you bastard, cloning is illegal!”
      “That’s why the price of the operation is so high,” purred Bradford. “But what price on your daughter, Stoffen? To hold her in your arms? To see her, again, live, whole?”
The machines whirred; the machines beeped; the  machines worked to keep alive a dead child.
      And the dead child lay there, trussed as a Thanksgiving turkey. She had escaped the only way possible. But allowing the body to breathe, or be forced into breathing, but keeping the mind asleep, was allowed.

Honorable Mention
Illustration
Bill Wetherill

Didn’t Bradford say in a few days…the drugs would be induced…to wake her? To force her up and out and awake, to see if the transplants worked?
      “Phaedra?”
      She’s gone, Stoffen. Give it a rest. Understand…she died a week ago. This is her body.
      He knew suddenly, with all certainly, that Lavina and Bradford were together in this very moment, miles away from the dead girl.
      She breathes.
      No, the machines force the breath. Her lungs are dead.
The Inquisition…they can keep a man alive for years down here. And we don’t mean three healthy meals a day and regular exercise.
      My daughter is dead. Phaedra Cale is dead and brought back, and my wife is screwing the doctor who brought her back, and Phaedra Cale is dead and I am alone with my dead child…flesh like maggots.
 An unproved fact thus far. Maggots and his daughter.
 In my daughter. One day.
      “Dear God,” he moaned through his hands, his sweat dripping down his face in the icy room of computers.
      If she can live anymore. Do vegetables live? Do apples, for that matter? They breathe, yes, but can they live?
      He remembered the news reporters, with their flashing bulbs, in his face and under his skin and mind, and one, a faceless man, with a camcorder microphone in Cale’s face, the faceless ghost asking, demanding: Do you miss your daughter, Mr. Cale?
      He had replied, of course: I love her. I miss her and I love her.
      And now comes the ultimate test, wheedled his mind. The ultimate test, Cale baby, oh, baby. How MUCH do you love her? Enough?
      His hands rubbed together, dry and rasping, feeling the indention in his flesh where the wedding ring had been.
      “How much?” groaned Cale and then reached out to touch her.
      He had expected rotting flash, cold, runny skin escaping her body and onto his fingers, maggot-ridden and decaying…it was merely cool to the touch, warming slowly, no maggots, no decay…nothing but cool skin.
 A     nd the pulse, slowly, beating, a steady thumpa-thumpa-thump, like an egg twitching with life.
      Worst day in my life…Phaedra Cale dies.
      But they brought her back…
      “Phaedra?”
      Do…do you love her enough, Cale? Love her enough, or just enough for the paying of the price, for the cameras? Is that the love you have, Stoffen Cale, because that’s not love, that’s just ownership, like a rake or a dog or an Ace of Spades.
      Even the damned love, someone once said, but it’s not love unless a sacrifice can be made. A Sunday evening devoted to tea parties. Going without a family vacation or that nice new car.
      Is that your love, Stoffen Cale? Or is your love as dead as Lavina? As dead as the cancer which killed your daughter?
      He touched her cool skin, her pulse, and then the wires attached to her body, his fingers trailing over the breathing tubes that had attacked her gentle lips, spreading like cancer over her lower face.
      What do YOU love more, Cale? The idea of a daughter, alive, breathing, or a daughter entombed in stone and cold dead, not just cool skin? What do you love, Cale, and who is it anymore? Lavina is gone; Bradford is gone; and now there’s just you and one nurse, who you could easily kill if it came down to it; oh yes, and then there’s Phaedra Cale, alive through machines and someone else’s child’s eyes and brain and blood…who do you love now, Cale?
      “Phaedra,” he whispered, and this time there was hardly any grief in his voice, and he reached and gently stroked her cheek.
      Her eyes, closed, veined. Perhaps blind.
      Her tears…her eyes rotting away from the outside in, the inside out, the tears and the cries and then the drugs that made her scream about the bugs on the walls, the knives in her pillows…
      Well, Cale, how much do you love her? And which is it: life, death, an existence in-between? Which one, Cale…which one is the way of love?
      Who loves her, Cale: Lavina and Bradford, who want life for her…or you, who wants a quiet and not entirely pleasant demise? You have no proof she is a vegetable, comatose, insane, or will awaken blind and an addict. You have no PROOF.
      “No,” he whispered to the voices. “No.”
      All we have is love. Even the damned have that.
      “My daughter,” whispered Stoffen Cale, the failed man and the failure of a father, as he stroked her cheek, as his fingers gently held the breathing tubes, and then began to pull them, inch by inch, up and free and away.
      “I love you,” he whispered, and the tears fell upon her pale child’s face, her sunken eyes, upon his first and last and only child because the worst day ever in Stoffen Cale’s life was the day he ended his daughter’s.