Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  “See?” Gramma murmurs. “Spring.”

  Mr. Curtis’s toes are immaculately-groomed and filed, painted a pale salmon color with a pearly sheen. It’s really lovely.

  “Nice work, Gramma.”

  The funeral home business is prone to odd jokes. Very odd jokes.

  Gramma presses a hand to her pink smock in feigned shock. “It wasn’t me! He came in that way. Your father washed him and noticed them then.”

  “You gonna leave ’em that way?”

  “Yes. I could take it off, but—” she shrugs, and the beaded chain on her glasses rattles “—his family won’t see it. And he deserves to go to the afterlife the way he went out, the way he wanted to be.”

  I nod. We won’t tell anyone. Keeping secrets is part and parcel of the funeral business. It’s been ingrained in me since I was a child. With my mom as coroner and my dad as a funeral director, the house is both morgue and mortuary. It’s an odd arrangement, to be sure, but it’s a product of an old era and lack of local funding to build a proper morgue in the county seat. We are practitioners, in many ways, of some very sacred rites. We keep the secrets of the dead, whether they involve Mr. Curtis’s pink toenails or the frilly underwear worn by a local (male) politician. One teenage boy involved in a drunk driving accident had a pocketful of condoms that we discreetly made disappear. There was also a woman who had pulled out most of her hair, so we covered that with a hairpiece. And we put a woman who had been cutting herself for years in a long-sleeved dress. We owe it to the Dearly Departed to give them some sense of dignity, not to spread them out naked for the world’s judgment. Once the doctors and police have done their job, it is our work to make things respectable, to put everything that’s been torn apart by their scrutiny back together. We may crack wiseass jokes behind closed doors, but when it’s Showtime, it’s all about the somber respect.

  Gramma leans back. “There.” She pats Mr. Curtis’s serene and glowing face. He looks as though he’s fallen asleep in the sunshine. “If I have time after dinner, I’ll paint your toes a proper shade of crocus pink for your send-off,” she tells him.

  My stomach involuntarily growls, and I grasp the front of my muddy top. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Spaghetti and meatballs.”

  “Oh, yum.”

  Most people think it’s weird to think about food around the dead. But…we’re used to it. People are just flesh, whether they’re dead or alive. That doesn’t diminish our respect for them, but life is for the living.

  I reach down to remove Mr. Curtis’s sock from Lothar’s mouth. Lothar seems clearer on this concept than most people, which is why we love him. I redress Mr. Curtis’s foot as Gramma packs up her makeup kit and wanders out of the room.

  It’s just me, the dog, and the Dearly Departed now. After blow-drying Lothar for about thirty seconds—when he drifts out of reach of the hairdryer cord—I sit on Gramma’s stool next to Mr. Curtis. When I was a little girl, I used to talk to the Dearly Departed. It was sort of like having a continually-changing set of imaginary friends. I would daydream about what their lives had been like, painting elaborate stories of who they were and where they’d been. The never answered me, of course. My mom would always do a sweep of coffins before Showtime to make sure I didn’t leave any toys in the casket after an incident when I left a stuffed dog in Mrs. Spears’s coffin and it was buried with her. I cried for days, but my mom told me that the dog was with Mrs. Spears in heaven.

  It sounds pretty weird that I talked to corpses, but not so much when I think about the fact that I didn’t have many friends when I was small. Kids were always too afraid to come to our house. There was our neighbor, Renee, but she’s no longer speaking to me. But sometime in the last couple of years, what my folks did for a living became interesting, at least around Halloween. Not sure when that happened, but I wanted to be treated normally, not like the Ghoul Girl. Even if I didn’t always act like it behind closed doors.

  “Mr. Curtis,” I say to the rosy corpse, “your loved ones will be here soon to say goodbye. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I hope it is good and wonderful for you.”

  I reach out to touch his hand. It’s cold, like meat left out on the counter for too long. I don’t know what his vision of heaven was, but I hope there is plenty of pink nail polish and that he doesn’t have to hide his toes.

  A pang of loneliness squirms to the surface. I don’t really have anyone living to talk to now. Not since the Halloween party last year. I lost my best friend, Renee, that night, and now I just have the dead to talk to.

  I slide from the stool, hearing voices and doors slamming somewhere in the house. I whistle for Lothar and head back through the swinging doors to the Body Shop.

  My mother is standing in the middle of the floor, covered in blood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I skid to a stop.

  The only sound that comes out of my mouth is: “Oh.”

  My mom nods to me. She’s dressed neck to ankle in a white hazmat suit. She’s holding her hands up, and the blood is dripping down her arms. It’s not just red; black and brown goo is smeared down the front of her suit, too. Her face is covered with a clear plastic mask and her hair in a shower cap. “Hey, honey. How was school?”

  “I think my day was better than yours.”

  My mom’s blue eyes crinkle at me. “Yeah. I’m sure it was.” She leans over her shoulder and yells through the exterior door, which is propped open. “Garth! Park that floater over the drain. I’m dripping on the floor.”

  I wrinkle my nose and back away. Floaters are bodies that are found in water. They puff up with intestinal gases and then stink like hell when they’re punctured. My mom, as county coroner, has had a couple of them before. I have no desire to be around this.

  Lothar, of course, is enchanted and ready to roll in something stinky. He scuds past me to the open door, yipping excitedly.

  My brother, Garth, pushes in a wheeled cart topped with a black body bag. The bag isn’t really doing a good job of containing the corpse juice, which is leaking from the open zipper. I can hear it sloshing inside the bag, too.

  My father stands in the doorway behind me. I know he’s staring at the mess this is making on the floor. I can see his fingers twitching to move toward the garden hose we keep hooked up beside one of the sinks. “Where did that come from?”

  Garth snorts. He’s wearing a hazmat suit like my mom and has my mom’s dark hair. He puts the brakes on the cart’s wheels and backs away from the mess. He crosses his long arms over his chest, but I can see the curiosity glinting in his eyes. “Fisherman hooked that trying to catch some catfish.”

  “Do we know who it is?” Dad asks.

  More boots clomp into the room. Sheriff Billings trails a respectful distance away from the cart. He’s a middle-aged man with a mustache that looks like it came right out of the seventies—a pornstache. His nose is wrinkled, and there’s residue of Vicks VapoRub glistening in his mustache to try to mask the smell. “We think it could be a college kid who fell out of his canoe over the summer and has been missing ever since.”

  “On the Beer Float?” My mom snorts.

  “Yeah,” the Sheriff says.

  The Beer Float is when a bunch of young people cruise down the muddy Milburn River in kayaks, inner tubes, and canoes. Usually, it’s a flotilla of drunkenness with beer coolers in tow, punctuated by trips on riverside rope swings and shrieking about snakes. Not that I would know. I’ve never been invited to go.

  My mom tugs at the zipper, and everyone steps back. “I’ll tell you what I can when I get in there, but all I can say for now is…your unknown subject is dead.”

  “Can I get that in writing?”

  “Sure. Cause of death might take a while, though.”

  The smell of rancid, rotting flesh and methane rolls over me. I spy green and black skin, and I wrinkle my nose.

  Garth leans over my mother’s shoulder, fascinated. He’s never had a floater of his own before.
He’s always wanted to follow in my parents’ footsteps, in the hidden ways of the dead. He was teased a lot in high school for being sort of emo and ghoulish, but now that he’s graduated, he’s the only guy his age with his own truck, a good paycheck, and a toehold in a family business that will never feel the effects of a poor economy. He’s taking part-time classes in mortuary school online.

  That’s the thing about this business. Most funeral homes are family gigs. It’s hard to explain why, but I think a lot of it has to do with the bizarre and sort of secret nature of what we do. Outsiders wouldn’t understand. I’ve heard it likened to cop families and military families, in that way. Once you’re born into it, it’s hard to get out. And Garth doesn’t want to.

  My father scribbles some notes on a pad, sighing. I’m sure he’s thinking about closed caskets and sealers and hopefully talking the Loved Ones into cremation.

  I fade away, though. I slip back through the door and up the stairs to change my muddy shirt. But I’m pretty sure that I’m going to need a shower to get that smell out of my hair.

  *

  Growing up at the funeral home, I was always very conscious of the difference between our public face and our private one. The staid rooms at the front, the flowers and the artificial smell of roses, the parlor—those things are for the public. Even the rooms at the back, the Body Shop and the Green Room, are for the public in a way. Maybe it’s because so much of what we do there is open to public scrutiny.

  But I always thought of the second floor of the house as nothing but ours.

  An oak door leads to the back staircase. On the side facing the first floor, it’s immaculately polished, smelling faintly of lemon. Even the cut-glass doorknob is cleaned on a regular basis, though the inside of the door has been painted over many times and never stripped. The stairs are covered with a bright magenta runner to cover the scratches in the risers, and the walls are painted a vivid green, the color of grass in the springtime. My mom and I did that one summer when I was twelve and business was slow. She let me pick the color, and I chose it because it was cheerful.

  I pass pictures hanging on the walls as I ascend the steps. But these are not the somber photos outside the parlor. These are pictures of Gramma and Gramps, when he was alive, dressed like hippies and leaning against a VW Beetle. Gramma had long, black hair down to her butt and wore a halter top with no bra and low-slung jeans. Gramps had hair down to his shoulders, a beard, and was wearing a ridiculous shirt with a repeating fish print across the entirety of the fabric. He looks a little squinty, too, like he might be startled. Or stoned.

  And there’s my mom and dad as teenagers in the eighties. Dad had an impressive amount of hair, black as coal and standing up in a Mohawk. He sported an earring and was wearing eyeliner. He was a lot skinnier then, dressed in black boots, jeans, and a white jacket. My mom looks like Cyndi Lauper in the photo, with her dark-red hair teased out beyond the limits of gravity. Her wrists were covered in black jelly bracelets, and she was wearing a Victorian-looking lace dress. Black, of course. There were neon balloons behind them, so I always assumed it was at their college homecoming. They’d met when Dad was in mortuary school and my mom was in medical school. They’d both grown up in the business – Dad’s family ran Sulliven’s funeral home, and Mom’s dad was a coroner three counties away. Kismet, right?

  They were a bit less Goth in their wedding photos. There’s a shot of them cutting their cake in the parlor downstairs, my dad still in solid black and my mother in a thrift-store dress with a flapper feel. My mom’s hair was no longer red, but still dark and curled back from her face. And my dad’s was short and less plentiful. I wonder if whatever he was doing to it in the eighties killed it.

  And then there’s us—Garth and me. The pictures start out with us being ordinary little kids in footie pajamas, clutching action figures. Both dark haired and pale like our parents, but you can see the change, slowly, over time. Garth got tall and skinny and went through an emo phase when he wouldn’t smile at cameras and spent most of his spare money on video games about the zombie apocalypse. He started stretching his ears out with these plug things until he decided to get serious about inheriting the funeral home business last year. He got them trimmed and sewn shut, and now you can’t really tell. But I know who he is, beneath it all.

  I started out looking exactly like Garth—thin, tall, and brunette. Also flat chested. I’m still waiting for something to happen in that department. But after around ten, I decided to try to buck that. A whole lotta pink in crept into my wardrobe around that time—and stuck around. Lace tights peeking out under my Girl Scout uniform. White sneakers. I started collecting Disney movies and developed a fondness for glitter nail polish. I tried out for cheerleading and failed miserably. Looking at my family and me standing together now, one of us doesn’t belong. And it’s me.

  I want it this way. I want to be regular. I want to blend in. I don’t want to have people staring at me and whispering. I’d like people to relate to me as a person, not as the Ghoul Girl.

  Most of our living quarters are on the second floor. There’s a living room, eat-in kitchen, a bathroom, and three bedrooms. It’s kind of cheek by jowl. My family is full of chatter and banging doors and clanking dishes. I set Lothar down on the brightly-colored runner rug, and he happily trots away to the kitchen. He passes my parents’ room, Gramma’s room, and Garth’s room. There’s another little room there that used to be my nursery but is now used for storage. It still has yellow wallpaper with baby ducks on it, but the space has been taken over by Garth’s music equipment.

  I head up the last flight of stairs, to what used to be the attic, and open the door to my room. I guess it’s sort of a bedroom. It’s been somewhat finished, with drywall covering the studs in the walls at a funny sloped angle. There are storage crawlspaces behind the drywall to hide junk that my family hasn’t used in years. Above the drywall, I occasionally hear the scratching of squirrels and the warbling of mourning doves. I should tell my dad about that so he can evict them, but I don’t have the heart to do it. I like seeing the squirrels climb down my window screens in the morning and hearing the coo of the doves in the evenings. Windows pierce both ends of the attic, facing east and west, so I get a fair amount of light. Garth wanted the attic like nobody’s business, and he had it up until he was twelve. After that, he was too tall to stand upright without his head whacking the ceiling. Mom and Dad made him move back downstairs after he gave himself a concussion playing air guitar.

  It’s now painted pale peach, with a few glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the low ceiling. My books take up one wall and there’s a chest of art supplies on the floor. I haven’t done anything with those for a while. My bed’s covered with a pile of blankets, since it can get pretty cold up here. I dig through my clothes for something clean and head back down to the second-floor bathroom, hoping to beat my mom to the shower before she needs to wash off all that floater ick.

  I open the small, frosted glass window above the bathtub. It’s an old-fashioned claw foot tub with a shower curtain that goes all the way around. There’s a modern shower apparatus hooked up to it, but no modern ventilation. The window gets opened, no matter the time of the year, to keep the ceiling from mildewing.

  I shuck off my clothes, hop in, and let the warm water pelt my skin, hopefully rinsing the smell of the floater away. I always got a bit OCD about washing away weird smells. So I ask for fancy body washes and shampoos for holidays. My favorite one is called “Pure Ocean,” and smells like what I imagine the ocean smells like. I’ve never seen it in person. Just the muddy waters of the rivers around here and the strange things they cough up during flood season.

  I lather up and rinse off when the water starts to turn cold. When I bend to turn the faucet off, my hair falls forward. If it’s not flat-ironed, it’s curly. Like eighties curly. I would never go out of the house like that, but it’s fine for dinner with my family.

  I towel dry and slip into a sweat suit. It’s one I u
se for running cross-country—light blue and white, our school colors. I fish a pair of white athletic socks from the clean laundry and pad down the hall.

  I’m immediately surrounded by a smell. With the door closed downstairs, it’s a good smell, thank god. Spaghetti sauce.

  There’s a reasonably modern kitchen at the end of the hall. It used to be part of the servants’ quarters once upon a time, but my folks added on to it. We can’t run the microwave at the same time as the stove, or we blow a fuse. We eat at a scratched metal table that my mom used to use for dissection. Don’t be grossed out. Bleach kills everything. The table reflects an antique, many-armed light fixture that used to run on gas and was converted to electricity about a century ago. My dad is obsessive about dusting it, but it still gathers wispy pale spiders.

  The refrigerator hums soothingly, covered with comics cut from the newspaper and pizza coupons. Gramma is standing at the stove, ladling meatballs onto my brother’s plate. Garth’s in a T-shirt and jeans, displaying his sleeve tattoos. Dad is filling the iced tea pitcher, and Mom is setting the table. Her hair is damp, so I assume she slid into the shower after me or hosed off downstairs. Lothar sits under the table, his tail thumping against the wooden floor.

  So normal. Yet so screwed up.

  I grab a plate and get in line behind my brother. Gramma gives me two extra meatballs. “You’re getting too skinny.”

  My mom turns around. She’s ditched the hazmat suit for purple velour yoga pants and a matching top. She looks like a belly dancer and a pimp who have been fused in some terrible accident. She squints at me sharply. “You’re not getting an eating disorder, are you?”

  “No!” I yelp. “Jesus, it’s cross-country season. I’m running.”

  As I approach the table, my mom yanks up the sleeve of my track suit and pinches my arm. “Girls your age read too many of those damn magazines.”

  My mother worries about everything. I think it’s because she sees so much crazy shit that she assumes it must live underneath her roof. Hypervigilance and all that. I mean, she’s a doctor. You’d think she’d roll the other way, but noooooo…