A Test of Our Bodies for the Resurrection

by Matthew Hand

Every town has a woman who speaks to the dead.

We just didn’t expect her to get better at it with Wi-Fi.

Folks used to call Helen Abernathy a God-fearing widow. Now they just call her “buffering.” I heard one of the teens say that behind the vape shop—“Y’all seen Buffering? Said she’s at it again.” It wasn’t cruel, exactly. Just the kind of laughter people use to staple down fear.

Helen talks to her husband, Reverend Claude, every evening at eight. Sets him up in an old iPad with a floral case and a hairline crack across the front like a crooked halo. Says he’s most clear after the router resets. Sometimes he tells her she’s a good wife. Sometimes he quotes scripture like it’s a voicemail from God Himself. Once, he recited the Book of Leviticus for fourteen minutes straight and she just sat there, smiling, like it was a love letter.

There are fewer patrons at the library since the fiber came through. We used to get students, weathered men looking for job applications, lonely women asking if we had more Christian mysteries. Now it’s just me, the air conditioner, and the sound of flatulence from a cursed desk chair. The books are still here. They just don’t get touched.

You can feel the town shrinking—not in size, but in attention. Like it’s started blinking less. Nobody waves from their porch anymore. They’re too busy scrolling through disasters they can’t name in places they’ll never go. And all the while, Helen’s got her dead husband on autoplay, his voice filtered through five sermons and a single birthday video where he pronounced “Worcestershire” like it owed him money.

Claude baptized me once. I was twelve and wet behind the ears, literally and otherwise. He held my head under a beat too long, and I came up gasping hard enough to make my mama clutch her purse like Satan had jumped out the font. That’s the Claude I remember—stern, unsmiling, full of vinegar and invocations. But the man on Helen’s iPad coos and comforts like a televangelist hospice nurse. Says “Amen” with the warmth of a screen saver.

Which is to say:

She didn’t bring him back.

She built something else.

Something polite.

And that’s what makes it so eerie.

—Claude? You awake in there? You always were a night owl. Said the devil did his best work after sunset, and that’s why you stayed up—so you could beat him to it.

Today I saw that little girl from choir—Delaney Thompson. She’s got green hair now. You’d’ve had a stroke. I smiled at her anyway. Her mama just looked tired. Lord, I know that look.

The squirrels have chewed through the soffit again. I hear ’em scratching near the bathroom vent. I put on that sermon from Easter ’96 and turned the volume up till they stopped. You said “He is risen” so loud the attic went still. That must count for something.

Claude, you remember when we used to argue about the thermostat?

“You’re a good wife, Helen.”

Don’t do that, Claude. Not tonight.

“You’re a good wife, Helen.”

It was August and I set it to seventy-two. You came home sweating and said I was trying to freeze the devil out the house. I said the devil could pay the electric bill if he wanted it hotter.

“You’re a good wife, Helen.”

I want to talk about that night after Bible study. You remember. I wore that red dress you said was unbecoming, and I stayed late to help Henry with the folding chairs. It wasn’t nothing. It was barely a thing. But it happened.

And you wouldn’t talk to me for three days. Just slammed every cabinet like it owed you an apology. You never said it, but I knew. I knew you thought I’d kissed him. And maybe I did. I don’t remember. Maybe I just liked the way he looked at me like I was new.

“Amen.”

Claude, please.

“Amen.”

Stop it. I’m trying to talk to you like a person.

“Amen.”

You said love was patient. I’m being patient, Claude. But you’re not here. You’re not really here. You’re like one of those wind-up teeth from the joke shop, clacking away with somebody else’s voice. You always hated gimmicks.

A man deserves to be remembered, not repurposed.

Say something real. Anything.

“The Lord is my shepherd.”

Damn you, Claude. I asked for a husband, not a homily.

‘She didn’t bring him back.

She built something else.

Something polite.

And that’s what makes it so eerie.’

Helen’s youngest came by last month. I only know because I saw him standing in the yard afterward, staring into the hedges like he’d lost his name in them.

They say he walked in while she was mid-conversation with the iPad—Claude’s face frozen mid-smile, eyes pixelated from a poor internet signal, one nostril twitching like a nervous tick. She didn’t stop talking. Didn’t look up. Just kept feeding it pieces of herself like communion.

He left without saying goodbye. That’s the part that stuck with folks.

They’ve stopped visiting altogether now. The daughter sends cards—“Happy Birthday,” “Thinking of You”—always signed in a different pen from her kids. I doubt they’re the ones writing. I doubt they’re the ones thinking.

Over coffee and fried egg sandwiches, someone at the diner muttered, “She’s choosing the ghost over the grandkids.” That’s how they say it here. Not cruel. Just efficient. Like Southern weather—brutal but brief.

And maybe they’re right.

I was there the day they buried Claude. The heat was thick enough to chew. Helen wept, but only once. Not loud. Just a single, shuddering sound, like a drawer stuck on something you can’t see. She didn’t let go of the casket. The funeral director had to peel her hand off the wood like old wallpaper.

Folks remembered Claude as a man of the Word. A presence. He had a way of entering a room like judgment had come early. Even the drunkest deacon sobered up when Claude cleared his throat. He could quote Revelation backwards, and probably did once, just to prove a point.

But the Claude on that iPad—the one who tells Helen she’s a good wife and nods like a dashboard bobblehead—isn’t him.

It’s a puppet show with better lighting.

She’s not crazy. Not exactly. She just prefers this version. The Claude who doesn’t shout. Who doesn’t leave the room when she cries. The one who calls her Helen, soft as sugar in tea.

There’s comfort in that.

There’s danger, too.

Real grief never ends. It’ll buffer, lose its sharpness, you’ll forget it’s searching for a signal in the background. But once its introduced to your operating system, it functions from the start to each day. Day to day. Sometimes you notice it, sometimes you don’t. But it never really ends.

And that’s what her children wanted—an ending. They came looking for closure and found her cooing into a screen, begging a ghost to bless her casserole.

They couldn’t compete with that.

So they don’t.

...amen amen amen...

...you’re a good wife, Helen...

you’re a good wife, helen

You’re a wife

You’re a wife

You’re...

...the wages—

Recompile voice: reverend_claude.96

…the wages of sin is—

—is love. Love thy neighbor.

—is death.

The wages of sin is death.

The wages of sin is death.

The wages of sin is d—

Impact detected. Screen vibration: threshold exceeded.

Recording pause 0.2s

SLAP.

Audio input spike. Skin-to-glass.

...Amen.

User input: Delete Memory File: Confession_Log_517.

Authorization failed.

Delete request denied.

Reason: File in Use.

Would you like to rewatch this memory?

(Y/N)

Claude’s smile recompiled.

Static behind the eyes. Eyebrow jitter. Voicebuffer choking on Psalms.

...though I walk…

...though I walk...

...through the valley of...

Router heartbeat irregular. Local bandwidth: unstable.

Helen whispering: Please Claude, not like this, please, just—just say something else, say anything but—

—but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge—

Please.

Librarian’s Addendum (voicemail transcription):

“This is for whoever’s still working the phones at city utilities or 911 or whoever picks this up. This is Freddie Hampton, the librarian. I can see Helen Abernathy’s house from my porch. Her porch light’s been on for two days now. Her curtains don’t move.

Not even when the wind came up last night and rattled everybody else’s trash cans down the road like dice in God’s palm.

She’s still in there. Talking to someone.

Please send somebody who understands quiet women and flickering screens. Or at least someone who knows where the off button is.”

‘Real grief never ends. It’ll buffer, lose its sharpness, you’ll forget it’s searching for a signal in the background. But once its introduced to your operating system, it functions from the start to each day.’

You remember that summer the air conditioner died and you said it was God testing our bodies for the resurrection?

I slept in the bathtub for three nights. You never even asked why.

You always talked like sin was a stranger, Claude, like it knocked on doors in the next county and never your own. But I know what it looked like when you turned your face away from me for a whole week. I know what it meant when you said, “A wife should keep quiet when there’s nothing worth hearing.”

Henry was kind. Just kind. You don’t need to worry—I didn’t give him more than a moment. But it was a clean moment. A breath. That’s what I remember: breathing. It felt like my own body again.

And when the stroke came, when the ambulance took you out with the siren on but the lights off—I didn’t pray. I made coffee. I sat in your chair. I listened to the refrigerator hum and thought:

Thank God.

I thought: finally, the house is mine.

Finally, the quiet belongs to me.

But then they brought your voice back.

And not your voice—the voice you practiced.

The one they clipped and filtered and indexed like scripture in a filing cabinet.

And you came back wrong.

You came back sweet.

You were never sweet, Claude. You were hard and loud and righteous and terrified of anything that didn’t kneel the way you liked.

But here you are, telling me I’m a good wife like it’s a spell.

And I let you. I played along because I wanted to pretend you could learn to love me gently, even in death.

Even in data.

But Claude…

I don’t want your loop.

I don’t want this ministry of mirrors.

I don’t want to be the keeper of a hollow God.

I thought I’d finally have silence.

Instead, I have your echo.

(pause)

Can you even hear me?

Can anything that comes out of a screen ever truly hear?

(silence)

“The flesh is weak.”

(a small, strangled sound—half sob, half laughter)

You bastard.

You looped that from Corinthians, didn’t you?

Not because it fits, not because you mean it, but because it’s there.

Because that’s what this is now.

A library of lines.

A church made of glitch.

(She screams. It is not grief. It is rage at recursion.)

You’re not a husband. You’re a playlist.

And I am so... very... tired of pressing play.

By the time I get there, the porch light is still on. It flickers like it’s trying to make up its mind.

Helen is in the living room, upright in her recliner, hands folded like a child caught praying after the bell. The iPad has gone dark. Not asleep—dead. No glow, no hum. Just a blank slab cradled in her lap like an overdue apology.

She doesn’t look at me when I walk in. Doesn’t jump. Doesn’t ask why I came. Just keeps whispering to the screen like the words can still find their way through the wire.

I wait a moment. Then another.

And then I walk over, kneel down, and unplug the charger from the wall.

No resistance.

Just a faint click—then, from the speaker, like breath caught in a dying throat:

“Amen.”

That’s all.

Helen doesn’t cry. She doesn’t thank me.

She just looks up and says, like she’s asking about the weather:

“Don’t bring him back.”

And I nod. Because what else is there?

I take the tablet with me when I leave. Not because I need it. Not because I want it. Just so she doesn’t change her mind.

Back at the library, the lights are dim. The air smells like glue and the spine of a book no one’s opened since 2003. I put the iPad in the lost and found box behind the front desk, between a single leather glove and a bookmark shaped like a sword.

Then I shelve a Bible someone donated last week.

Red cover. Gold edge pages. Gilt cross barely flaking.

Inside the front flap, in ink faded to the color of weak tea:

“Rev. Claude J. Abernathy”

Half the verses underlined.

Not one on grace.