Dead Inside

a short story by Denise S. Robbins

Photo by Tanya Barrow on Unsplash

Denise S. Robbins is a Pushcart Prize–nominated author whose stories have been published in literary journals including The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and many more. Her debut novel, The Unmapping, was published in June 2025 by Mareas at Bindery Books. She writes the Substack Noticements. Learn more at www.denisesrobbins.com.

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I drove home from the doctor’s office in a rainstorm. I nearly hit three cars on the way—one that slowed down without putting on a blinker, two that hid themselves in my blind spot—but that didn’t bother me. When I got home I parked in the driveway and turned off the car and sat in it for a few minutes as the rain beat down. Then I turned on my cell phone and dialed my husband, who picked up right away.

“I’m dead inside,” I said before he could say hello.

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor said I’m clinically dead. My heart isn’t beating and my lungs aren’t breathing. My body is just going through the motions, but no there’s no real blood and no real oxygen. I’m dead inside.”

I saw his face appear in the living room window. “You’re home?”

“Yes, I’m home. Want to go out for lunch?”

“Let me put on my shoes.”

“And grab that raincoat you never wear.”

I hung up. The key was still in the ignition. I stared at it and realized I had no idea how it worked. How could one twist of a tiny piece of steel bring a huge contraption like this minivan to life? And why did we own a minivan?

Ethan emerged from the house with the yellow rain jacket balled in his fist. He used it to shield his face as he ran to the car. He buckled up as I turned the ignition and clicked on the radio at full volume. It was a public service announcement for kid’s car seats. Adult-sized seats now available too.

He turned down the radio to a murmur, so all I could hear were the s’s and sh’s. “I thought you were just constipated,” he said.

“I thought so too.” It was true I hadn’t pooped in two months, which is what brought me to the doctor in the first place. It had happened before on a smaller scale, maybe five poopless days before the doctor prescribed a laxative. Sometimes seven. It always shocked the doctors, who told me it wasn’t physically possible to go this long without dying. Well, it was possible. Until it wasn’t, I suppose. These past months I continued to get shock and uncertainty. “How are you still alive?” they’d ask. Until someone finally decided to test it. I wasn’t. Now it made sense why I haven’t been very hungry either. Because I was dead inside.

“Where do you want to eat?” I asked. “We could do ice cream for lunch. What’s stopping us?”

“Um,” he said. “Can we talk about this first?”

“What’s there to talk about? I’m dead inside.”

“So, like, you don’t feel pain?”

“No, I still feel pain because my body remembers how to signal pain through my neurons.”

“But neurons are alive.”

“Not mine. It’s more of a mechanical response. Like when you get struck with a hammer on the knee. Even after you die, for a few minutes at least, your leg will still kick. Similarly, if you cut me open, I’ll still bleed, but only a little, like, red blood will appear, but it won’t flow much and will congeal pretty quickly. This also explains why it’s been so hard for them to take blood from me. They get just a tiny amount from each vein.”

“So you’re not dead. You’re immortal.”

“Nope. He said my body will continue to run its course according to the average lifespan. I’ll still get wrinkles and jowls. My hair won’t turn gray, but every old lady is dying it these days anyway. And, obviously, you could chop off my head and then nothing would really work anymore.”

“Obviously? How is that obvious? Did the doctor say so?”

“It’s just common sense. But probably not something we want to test.”

I drove down the long, familiar road to get from the east side of Madison to our favorite sushi place on the west, enjoying that the stoplights turned green just as I approached. The traffic had lessened and so had the rain, although the sky was still covered in dark clouds, so I could see the roads reflect the stoplights in wet slickness. A mirror of the world but fuzzy and broken.

I turned off to a side road, passed the sushi place, and turned right onto another road which led to a county highway.

“Where are we going?”

“Around County Q, it only adds ten minutes.” This road went through a prairie I used to walk through once a week. I hadn’t had the energy to walk much lately, or even get in my car except to go to the doctor, so this was a good substitute. I didn’t like driving fast, and this road went up to fifty-five, which was my absolute maximum, but I was usually able to waver around fifty without causing a ruckus. Today the truck behind me looked like it was getting restless, swerving to see if it could make a pass, but I kept on at a solid fifty-four. Then I saw that even at my slow speed I was approaching the car ahead. It had stopped completely in the middle of the street. The truck driver behind me honked. I waited and watched as a family of sandhill cranes walked across the road, followed by one goose. After a few minutes we were past the prairie and back in suburbia, passing by boutiques and grocery stores and schools and garden stores and Culver’s. As we approached the roundabout leading to Parmenter, traffic slowed to a crawl. Apparently everyone had forgotten how to use a roundabout today.

“Death to roundabouts,” my husband agreed with my silent meditation.

But when we turned the corner, traffic was still blocked, and ahead, I could see why: the road was closed, and everyone was in a frenzy figuring out how to turn around amid all the parked cars and no clear driveway. I got distracted by the tree ahead with a robin’s nest perched precariously on a branch that swooped over the street.

“It’s like a game of Rush Hour,” Ethan said. “You know, with the plastic pieces.”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, it’s like that game, yes. This isn’t rush hour though. It’s a suburban midday Saturday.”

“It’s just a mess,” he agreed. “It’s not Rush Hour, it’s Messy Hour.”

“Stupid Hour.”

“Construction Hour?”

“Everything Has Changed Hour.”

As we waited for traffic to move, the car parked just ahead of us turned on its lights and pulled away. “May as well park,” I said. “May as well see what all the fuss is about. How hungry are you? Can you wait?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s a festival,” he said, pointing up at the obvious carnival rides on the horizon a few blocks down. “They’ll have food.”

It was indeed a neighborhood festival causing all the commotion. Half-broken rides that rose no higher than the nearby high school as they spun kids around until they vomited. Stands of deep-fried everything. Dart games and balloons. The surefire smell of funnel cake. Signs advertising a fireworks show.

“God loves a festival,” I said.

“Really?” Ethan asked.

“How should I know?”

I think I believed more in God in that moment than any other previously in my life. Here I was, thinking and moving, even as my body was dead. It didn’t feel like a miracle, though. It felt more like a punishment. For what, I didn’t know.

“Wanna pray?” he asked.

“We never pray,” I responded.

“Never too late to start.”

“At some point, it probably is too late. Like after death.”

I turned off the car and got out. The storms had cleared but the air was still thick with moisture. It had been a long, hot summer, to which I had attributed my lack of energy and appetite. Aside from that, the heat never bothered me, especially not today, now that I was dead inside.

We went to the balloon dart stand and I missed every shot. Five year olds did better than me. Ethan won the games easily, however. Including Jacob’s Ladder, though not before he watched a Youtube tutorial on his phone before attempting it. When he succeeded, he beamed with pride. They gave him a stuffed bear and he gave it to the nearest child.

“Let’s go on a ride,” Ethan said.

I wanted to say that the rides had rules. Must be X feet tall. Must be technically alive. Instead I said, “No.”

“Come on, let’s go on a ride.”

“Okay.”

We were surrounded by a horde of teenagers who joked with each other on both sides of us. There were so many children here. I once wanted children. But that was before I found out I was dead inside. They started throwing a balloon dog around. It landed on my head.

“Sorry,” said a sweet-looking girl.

We got on the ride called the Strange Loop, which I’d always known as the Egg Roller and my husband knew as the Rock-O-Plane. We climbed into our little cage and clicked the belts shut. The ride took off in jolts at first as they loaded up the rest of the teenagers. “The doctors told me lack of defecation is perfectly normal,” I said.

“Is it?”

“After death, yes. So it all makes sense.”

The ride took off in earnest now. Our cage spun upside down one way, then the other way. A loud whooshing noise and the clambering of the machinery blanketed the teenager’s joyful screams.

“Clearly you can still think!” he yelled.

“In a way,” I agreed.

“And you can talk. And walk. So you can will your physical body to move and it moves.”

“It’s the neurons,” I said. “Still in that reactive state. Forever in that reactive state. At least until I disintegrate. But they’re not creating anything new. Just moving around things that are already there.”

“Isn’t that just… life?”

“No. You think that’s what life is?”

“I suppose not.”

“Think of me like a human-sized Rube-Goldberg machine.”

The ride finished.

“Now what?” he asked.

“You’re probably hungry,” I responded.

“Yes.”

“Plenty of food.”

“Let’s find the second-longest line.”

He agreed. In an earlier life, we had come to the conclusion that the food stand with the longest line was usually overhyped, while the stand with the second-longest was probably good. As we waited for shawarma and falafel we made quiet jokes to each other about the people who passed by, trying to imagine who was breaking up and who was newly dating and which siblings were the devil siblings. One family had five children with the same dark, straight shiny hair and big eyes, all of different sizes. The youngest one caught me staring and waved at me. I looked away. Then we got our food and I watched him eat both orders.

“What now?” he asked.

I took a sip of his cola. I never drink cola. “I think we should decide what we would do, and then do the opposite.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s how this day is going.”

“On a usual afternoon,” he said, “we’d probably go home and read on the couch.”

“So we can’t go home,” I said. “Let’s drive to St. Louis.”

“We are not driving to St. Louis.”

“Fine. What’s the thing you most don’t want to do right now?”

“Drive to St. Louis.”

“Okay, the next-most.”

“We could do our taxes.”

“It’s August.”

He looked over to the bar area. “We could get wasted and read the newspaper.”

“Where are you getting a newspaper?”

“I mean on our phones.”

“Sure, sounds good.”

We ambled over to the bar tent—with so many people now, all we could do was amble slowly forward, trying not to trip over all the kids—and found seats right by the bartender. We ordered Coors Lights and opened our phones. “You have to promise to only read things you don’t like,” I told him. “If I see Wikipedia I’ll dump my beer on your phone.”

“Let’s do CNN dot com.”

We read the news until every atrocity that had ever happened and ever would happen had been reflected into our glazed eyes and flipped in the brain. Death, death, death. And also, the rise of pickleball. By the time we finished, we’d each drunk four beers. When I stood up to go to the rest room I fell off my stool.

“Another beer,” I said after I returned. The bartender was on the other side of the tent, though, so I lifted my hand in a beckoning.

“What did you do in there?” Ethan asked.

“Pee.”

“You can pee?”

“Like water through a Britta filter. In and out. I’ll have another Coors, non-light this time,” I said this to the bartender, who had come over.

“Sorry, you’re cut off,” the bartender said.

“What? Why?”

“Because you fell out of your chair. “

“Because I’m clumsy,” I said. “Not drunk. I don’t feel a thing, I’m de—”

“That’s fine, we’re just leaving,” Ethan cut me off, looking helplessly at the bartender. “My wife, she’s going through something.”

“She can go through it with water,” the bartender said.

“No, we’re leaving,” I agreed.

Night had fallen and it was time for dinner. We stood in another long line, Ethan ate a funnel cake, then we went on another ride. When we got out he was so dizzy he leaned over and dry heaved but nothing came out. He burped and said a little came up then.

“This is fun,” he said, holding my hand as we walked to the area where the fireworks would soon begin.

“Good.”

“Only I wish I were less drunk.”

“Too late for that.”

“It’s only a matter of time, right?”

“What?”

“One day we’ll be old and broken. It’s only a matter of time.”

“A matter of time,” I said. “That’s a dumb phrase. Time has no matter.”

We found an open spot in the grass on the football field and laid down next to each other. He started kissing me. I kissed him back. He reached for my shirt. I slapped it away. “We are literally surrounded by hundreds of children.”

“I’m just teasing,” he said. “I’m drunk. I feel like we’re in high school again. Want to climb a water tower? Spray paint a sidewalk?”

“Are we going to be okay?” I asked him.

“Of course we are. Look at us today. We had a great day.”

“But what about tomorrow?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

The fireworks began. Explosions in the sky. The dogs yelped and the children squealed and clashing music played from different radiosets. It was too early for the 1812 Overture, but someone was playing it anyway, while someone else played Top Forty, and someone else, country. I closed my ears with my hands for a minute to make everything muted.

“I wonder how someone came up with the idea of fireworks,” I said. “Don’t Google it. Just tell me what you think.”

He turned onto his side and leaned on his elbow, the other arm stroking my hand softly.

“I think,” he said, “that people used to look up at the stars all the time, but then they got bored of it. Light pollution too, sure, but mostly, there were better things to do. But there was still that piece of soul that yearned for it. They didn’t realize it because it was easy to overlook. We all have tiny moments of nostalgia for our childhood that we look at and say, ‘That was nice,’ but don’t do anything about. But eventually we couldn’t avoid the stars forever. Someone looked up and remembered what it was like. Then they wanted everyone else to look too. But they were also very pragmatic, knowing that simply telling someone to look at the stars wasn’t enough to get them to do it. So they wanted to make the sky so appealing, so unavoidable, they began shooting explosives into the sky. Just to get them to notice.”

“Light pollution?” I said. “I’m pretty sure fireworks were invented before the lightbulb.”

“You told me not to look it up.”

“When’s the last time we looked at the stars?” I asked.

“There was that meteor shower three weeks ago but it was after your bedtime.”

“I’ll never change,” I said. “I’ll never have a new thought in my head. I’ll never really see a meteor shower. What about kids?”

“What about kids?” he asked.

“I can’t have kids. But you can.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“How?”

“We just will. That’s how things work.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s hard to make anything work.”

“I’m not afraid of hard.”

“It’s not a miracle that I’m dead. It’s a miracle that you’re alive.”

“After all those beers.”

“Yes, dear.”

The fireworks ended with a pitiful silver shower. Nobody moved, expecting the show to continue. This was not a grand finale, these mournful lights. You needed the big ones all at once to signify an ending. But the fireworks operator didn’t get the memo. It was over.

We walked back to the car. The robin’s nest from earlier had fallen on our windshield. Two small blue eggs were inside. I lifted it up and put it back in a nestling between two branches. Through the branches I caught a glimpse of the sky, but it was too hazy from firework smoke to see any stars.

I took the same roundabout route to get back, through County Q, even though it usually terrified me to drive this fast at night. Nothing scared me anymore, I realized. What did I have to fear? I was already dead. When I reached the intersection leading to University, I turned left instead, driving further out into the country. Sixty miles an hour, sixty-five, seventy. Headlights from the approaching cars flashing and disappearing. A languid rolling hill, and then another one. When I was a fearless teenager, I used to take these hills as fast as possible. Sometimes I got a little air, a brief free fall. I didn’t want to do that now, though. Ethan had fallen asleep. As I drove I could see stars through the windshield. They twinkled in and out, reminding me of the fireworks. That final silver shower, the many reaching lines of silver strands. Like they were reaching towards something. Reaching to all the humans on the ground, staring back at them. Hoping to pick them up and bring them close, their lost children. I pulled over on the side of a cornfield. I looked over to my husband. He often had a hard time sleeping. But now he was sleeping peacefully. I kept the door shut. I stayed sitting in silence. I didn’t want to break the spell.

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for further reading: Robbins recently wrote about immortality in fiction and The Iliad for Beyond the Bookshelf, the excellent Substack about reading and its impact on our lives by

Matthew Long

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