The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

For a while, the water had carried her weight, she said, and she lay on her back turning in meaningless circles, singing the choruses of the pop songs she remembered.

The girl who liked to stand beneath the poplar tree in the park said that she had died into an ocean the color of dried cherries. It took him a long time to understand that the throbbing noise he heard was not the rattling of the wheels along the tracks. The spots floated down around him, swirling and dipping in the wake of the train. A wind rose up and peeled the spots from their backs. The rails were leading him through a thick forest of gold-brown trees, but the trees were actually giraffes, and their long necks were reaching like branches into the sky. “Took me in my own bed.” He had closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he was on a train, the kind that trolleys small children around in circles at amusement parks. “It was my heart,” he insisted, thumping on his chest. Jim Singer, who managed the sandwich shop in the monument district, said that he had felt a prickling sensation in his fingers and then stopped breathing. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow-points of sand striking his skin, that he had truly realized he was dead.

The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face, then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. First he had died, he said, and then- snap!-the desert. When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier