by Paula Guran
Dahlia’s little brother had been hit by a car two months ago. The embalmer saw it on the news even though his mother didn’t want him to. He set the DVR to record it. The news had traffic camera footage. The little brother had gone sailing through the air. He was wearing Superman pajamas but he didn’t look much like Superman.
By this point the embalmer knew something about flying. He knew you had to hold your arms straight. You had to be an alien. Also you had to be invincible and maybe not need to breathe. Aliens didn’t have to deal with asphyxiation or ebullism and the embalmer figured that must help when it came to flying.
Dahlia’s brother wasn’t an alien. If he had been in space his face would have turned bright blue. His eyeballs would have frozen into solid snowballs. But he wasn’t in space. He was hit by a car and when the car hit him he flew only a short distance in his Superman pajamas.
So, the sadness. There was something he could do about that.
The embalmer chose one of his favorites—a black Labrador mixed with something else, something tall, a Great Dane maybe. The Labra-Dane’s name had been Diesel. He had lived next door at the Smiths’ house. The embalmer used to watch Diesel running the yard. Diesel was a champion Frisbee catcher. He loved to catch Frisbees. Boy could that dog fly! One leap and he was in the air, long ears streaming like bunting. In the winter, the Smiths wouldn’t bother with the Frisbee. It was too cold. After the sun had gone down, they’d stand on the porch and run a flashlight over the fresh snow. Diesel was mad for those little sparks of light, like they were animals, like they were squirrels. It didn’t matter that there was nothing but snow to fill his mouth. He’d bound in circles chasing the light and the Smiths would be careful to shine it only on the new snow, the snow unturned by Diesel’s snowplow body.
One day Diesel was out in the backyard. Now it was summer—oh, maybe, three months ago? The Smiths were building a new fence. Earlier they had thrown a Frisbee badly and Diesel had leapt so high he cleared the old fence and ended up in the embalmer’s yard. So they were building a new fence, a taller fence, a fence so high Diesel couldn’t possibly make it over.
And he didn’t.
The Smiths were cutting planks with a circular saw in the backyard and Diesel was running around loose, barking at squirrels, having a grand old time. Then he saw a flash, the saw-blade throwing off reflected triangles of sunlight. Well. You can guess what happened. That was it for Diesel.
The embalmer dug him up the day after he was buried. He had got pretty good with coat hangers and a pair of wire cutters. He didn’t have natron like the Egyptians, so he dried him out with silica gel packages from his mother’s closet. She always kept them.
Now Diesel was the embalmer’s favorite. He was a flier. He was the one the embalmer wanted to see most tugging at the end of his leash in Heaven. He had already chosen Diesel to be the leader of the pack.
But by then the embalmer had fallen in love; he was too young to know for sure if it was true love or just a love-mirage, but he suspected it was probably the first one. He watched Dahlia at school. He heard she didn’t bother to hand in her homework any more. She never answered questions. She had been popular for a while but that was starting to slip too. No one talked to her. It was like there was a terrible stink of death around her. But the embalmer knew death pretty well by that point and so to him it just made her more beautiful. Here was someone who had also seen the Before and the After. Everyone else in the class was just stuck in Beforeland. When After came their parents rushed them out of the room so that they could go on pretending that After was really Never.
So the embalmer left Diesel on Dahlia’s porch. Diesel was swaddled up very tightly. The embalmer had done a gorgeous checkered pattern with the bandages and then he had colored them black with a Magic Marker so that they matched the color of Diesel’s coat. It was his finest work.
What the embalmer didn’t know was that Dahlia was already an expert at mummification. When her little brother died she decided that time ought to have stopped. It had stopped briefly inside of her, and she had felt quiet and calm and safe in a sort of hazy forever—but then time had started up again with that sickening thud. She had been trying unsuccessfully to stop time ever since. She would sit for hours with her face pressed against the window and she would stare at the traffic passing by. When a car was going too fast she would begin to shake. “Stop!” she would whisper. “Please stop!” Sometimes the cars would stop. This gave her a sense of control. But sometimes they didn’t. This made her crazy. She started chewing on her hair but when she did that she got afraid that there was going to be a giant lump of hair inside of her and when she died some doctor would find it and know for sure that she was a hair chewer.
She was learning that the external world was too big, too hard. It could not be forced. On the other hand her body was something she did have control over. She had put on weight over the last two months. People kept leaving pies at the door. She never told her parents when she found the pies. She simply took the pies up to her room and ate them one by one, ate every slice of cold grief pie all on her own.
So, the weight. She wanted it off. She wanted to return to the exact size and shape she had been when her little brother had died. She started a cleanse, ordered the cold-pressed bottles of liquid online from All Juiced Up Cleansing Routines. She followed the routine for twenty days and at the end she had lost twenty pounds exactly as promised but not one inch of her had changed. She was still spilling out over the tops of her jeans. Her thighs were ungraceful as turkey drumsticks. She called up the number on the box to complain.
“That’s perfectly normal,” said the lady on the phone, her voice so cheerful that Dahlia for a moment saw a phantom floating smile in front of her eyes. “All the pounds, none of the inches. A miracle, huh? That way you don’t need to buy a new wardrobe! You can feel better about yourself but nothing needs to change!”
“But I want to change,” Dahlia said even though this wasn’t quite true. What she wanted was not to change, but to get to that point she had to change back first. It was very complicated.
“Huh,” said the lady. “No one ever wants to change. Not really. Take it from me, missy, illusion is enough. But what you’ve got works so what’s the big deal?”
Dahlia hung up the phone. She checked the ingredients on the bottle and discovered she’d been drinking turpentine. But the lady on the phone had been right. Dahlia felt clear all the way through, like it had tunneled a hollow space right through her own hollow space.
Still.
Two days later she called up again to demand a refund. She told the entire dead brother sob story while the lady clucked sympathetically at all the right points.
“Sorry,” the lady said at the end of it. “No can do. Death is a preexisting condition. It voids the money back guarantee.”
Dahlia said something unpleasant and slightly racist.
“Geez,” said the woman, “don’t get snippy. Tell you what, I’ll send you a free sample of our new product. It’s super secret right now but I swear it’ll do the job, okay? Okay.”
Dahlia slammed down the phone for a second time. The anger made her feel better. It hollowed her out as well. It turns out that anger and turpentine have a lot in common. But when she went to check on the mail later that day she found on her doorstep the swaddled corpse of the Labra-Dane, perfectly preserved.
“This is more like it,” she said, absently stroking the linen bandages. They stained her fingers black.
The embalmer felt Diesel’s absence immediately. When he slept, he slept fitfully. There was a hole in the middle of his dreams. The other dogs and cats had come to rely upon Diesel. They needed his sense of direction, his manic energy. He always knew which direction to pull and he never stopped wanting to be somewhere else. Now the others sat there. Some of the dead cats licked at their paws. Others fought, big screeching cat battles where they stood up on their hind legs and threw their front paws in front of them like puppeteers. It got so
that the embalmer could hardly stand the racket any more.
And then the next morning, Dahlia brought Diesel to school. He was awkward to carry. He wouldn’t fit in her backpack but she wouldn’t have wanted to carry him that way even if he had. She set him up just underneath her desk so that his bandaged nose poked against her knees while she worked at her fractions.
The embalmer didn’t see this but he heard about it at lunch. In math class he volunteered to deliver a note from Miss Persimmons, his teacher, to Miss Kitagawa, her teacher. The note was folded carefully in two but he read it anyway. The note said, “What do you want for dinner tonight, Kitty?”
Dahlia was in the classroom. She didn’t look up when he knocked on the door. She didn’t look up when Miss Kitagawa passed her to answer it. And when Miss Kitagawa was carefully writing the words “roast beef and mashed potatoes” underneath Miss Persimmons’ tidier handwriting, the embalmer pretended to knock an eraser off Miss Kitagawa’s desk. From down below all he could see was knees mostly. Miss Kitagawa’s knees which were dead white underneath her panty-hose. And more knees and sneakers. Dahlia’s knees. Diesel’s nose. Dahlia’s hand stroking the Magic-Markered bandages. He thought if she ever ruffled his hair like that he would probably just die he would be so happy.
After class the embalmer decided to risk it all on an approach. He feigned nonchalance. He carried a leash in his left hand.
“S’cuse me,” he mumbled. His throat was dry as hot tarmac.
Dahlia said nothing but she turned at least, she looked at him. Her eyes were the same color as the lockers. Time was not his friend right now. She would have to leave to catch her bus.
“I thought he might make a run for it.” He handed her the leash. Her eyes grazed him carefully, confused, skeptical, irritated, angry—but then she laughed all at once like a hiccough and she clipped it on to the Labra-Dane’s collar and then maybe it was okay even if she had been all of those things before
“I almost lost him in first period,” she confided. “He saw a squirrel. He’s absolutely bananas for squirrels.”
“He looks like he could drag you ten feet.”
“I’m stronger than I look.”
This is good, thought the embalmer, I’m really doing this. I think she might be in love with me.
But then there was the bus and even though Dahlia didn’t have any friends to remind her about it, there is some power that buses always have. They let you know they are leaving. They let you know you’re supposed to be going someplace else.
“Bye,” Dahlia said. She ruffled the top of his head very gently. He was barely taller than her shoulders. He thought about stilts. He thought he might need a ladder if he was ever going to kiss her. He wondered if maybe she’d be willing to stop growing so he could catch up a little bit.
But then the back of her skirt was swishing as she ran for the bus. He watched the inside of her knees which were lovely like little china cups and her calves which were perfect and her socks which were plain white and her sneakers which were older than they should be if she wanted to be popular but all the while he could still feel her fingers touching the hairs of his head and each of them like a raw nerve, each of them standing up like he’d been zapped by lightning.
He missed his own bus. He walked all the way home, but he didn’t mind.
That night the embalmer’s mother answered the door to find a policeman standing there, awkward; he looked like he wanted to clean his nails or his teeth but he didn’t have anything useful with which to get the job done. The embalmer peeked at him from the top of the stairway.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, his voice a dry cough with extra vowels, “but some of the neighbors have complained about missing animals.”
“Missing animals?” she asked.
“You’ve read the stories? Seen them on the news? Missing animals can mean all sorts of things. But sometimes it means. Well. A killer, you know? A psychopath. Very young. An infant psychopath.” He ran his hands through his hair like he was searching for something. “They like to cut things up, yeah? They like to hang them from trees. Or keep them in sheds.”
His mother was easily shocked. Her voice echoed with a slow quaver. “Has someone found an animal like that? Goodness gracious me!”
“Not as such,” answered the officer. “But we think. Maybe. The animals are missing, you see? So we think maybe that’s what’s happening.”
“But you’re not sure?” Relief edging in. “Maybe it’s something else? Maybe, coyotes?”
“That’s the thing, ma’am. Something already got them.” Cough cough. “Something already got them. The animals. Feline leukemia. Or a Buick. One of them drank weed killer, we think. It’s hard to tell. There’s no body to autopsy.”
His mother stared blankly.
“It’s only after they were dead we found out they were missing. So. Pretty strange, isn’t it? Someone digging up and taking dead pets? Pretty criminal, wouldn’t you say?” A rapid blink then the eyes swung to the stairs like searchlights. The embalmer almost gave himself up then and there. “When we find them we’ll know. That’s what I’m saying. So. Tell us if you see anything.”
That was the end of the conversation.
The embalmer ran to his bedroom and flopped down. His heart beat desperately, it shuddered in his ribcage like a fist pounding a door.
“I’d like to report a crime,” Dahlia said into the telephone. She wished there was one of those old springy cords she could twirl around her fingers while she was talking. She wanted her fingers to be more active. They twirled her hair but then she started licking her lips and that made her stop immediately. The craving was still strong, but she was stronger. She was stronger than she looked.
“Someone out there is killing people,” she said, “and dogs. Dogs too. The dogs are also important. It’s easy to overlook the dogs but we shouldn’t because they are the first sign, aren’t they?” She patted the Labra-Dane’s head. She wondered what his tongue looked like. She could see the nose, it glimmered from between the bandages like a third eye.
“Did you ever think it was cruel that God gave animals such a short lifespan? I mean, not for the animals. But have you ever thought about Adam and Eve? One day he’s playing with his cocker spaniel, throwing sticks or whatever, and the next day the poor thing just keels over. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with it. But then an angel says to him, ‘That’ll be you one day, kid. One day you’re just going to keel over. That’s what God did for you.’ And Adam knows he’s right. Adam starts watching everything drop around him. Bunnies. Grasshoppers. He swats a fly and then the fly stops moving. So he gets extra careful for a while but that doesn’t help because there’s a wolf that brings down a deer and if it didn’t bring down that deer then its wolfpups would starve and there’s a cat with feline leukemia and if it didn’t have feline leukemia eventually it’d go blind and mangy and brittle. All of these things are just happening anyway so it doesn’t matter what he does, it’s going to get him too. And he thinks, Jesus, why did you make me name all these fuckers?”
“I’m sorry, miss,” said the receptionist, “but you said there was a crime? Is someone hurt? Please stay where you are, miss.”
“I can’t help it,” she said, “I’m the victim of a crime.”
But then she wondered if that was true and she started replaying what she’d said. It made her sound like a serial killer. She wondered if they could trace the call.
“Sorry,” she said. “I think I must have dialed the wrong number. Is this All Juiced Up? There’s a problem with your product.”
She hung up the phone.
In the middle of the night the embalmer had the strange sense that something was trying to wake him up. He thought it was Diesel or he thought, rather, that it would have been Diesel yapping for his attention but Diesel wasn’t there any more.
He opened his eyes.
There was Dahlia. Her face was an inch away from the glass of the bedroom window. He could see her but he c
ouldn’t smell her. She was on the other side of the window. Her mouth had clouded the glass. There were two lip prints in the mist. It was like a giant mouth coming out of the darkness and into his room and there was Dahlia behind it.
He went to the window. He blew on it very gently. It did not cloud up. It was too warm inside the room. But he pressed his lips against it anyway. The window tasted of glass. It didn’t taste of Dahlia. But he kissed it again. She had leaned down for him. He didn’t need a stepladder at all.
The next day in class it was clear to the embalmer that Miss Persimmons was frightened. She had a nervous disposition to begin with. She jumped when the boys dropped their textbooks and of course this made the boys drop their textbooks a lot, on some days it sounded like London in the Blitz there were so many textbooks slamming the linoleum.
“Excuse me,” she said, “excuse me, boys and girls, everyone listen!”
A math book hit the ground. It was only an exercise book, it barely made a noise at all, but she still shuddered and all the boys sniggered under their hands.
It was her kitty. Her kitty had gone missing. Last week she was a person with a kitty but the embalmer knew that look, that she had already begun to accept being a person without a kitty. She looked devastated.
Another book fell. A hardcover this time, the air whoofed out, scattering dust in a perfect circle around it.
Then there was silence.
After class, everyone in the hallways was whispering and pointing and pulling and snarling, yapping, yammering. They were an angry crowd, there were sharpened pencils, there were scissors, they were cutting at her hair, they were slicing up her skirt. They knew it was her, of course they did, they knew it was Dahlia. They knew it was her because they’d all seen the black dog she carried around with her, and even when they couldn’t see the black dog, it was still like there was a black dog following her day by day by day so they knew and it made them happy and it made them angry and it made them dangerous.