Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  Dad rolls his eyes. “She’s fine. Lay off.”

  “You’ll never get boobs if you don’t eat,” Gramma announces, sliding to her place at the end of the table.

  Garth sniggers. “Yeah, you want boobs, don’t you, Charlotte?”

  “I am not anorexic.” I stuff a meatball in my mouth to prove it.

  “I’d better not hear any retching from the bathroom.” My mom shakes her fork at me, dripping pasta on her plate. “I’m watching you.”

  I sigh in frustration. Last week, she was convinced that Garth had OCD when she caught him washing his hands with bleach. His protestations that he’d been handling some stray intestines fell on deaf ears, and she’s been watching him like a hawk for cleanliness rituals.

  Garth and I exchange glances across the table. He winks and drops a piece of bread on the floor, then snatches it up before the dog gets it. He puts it in his mouth and crunches it right in front of my mother.

  “Garth!” Gramma hisses. “That’s disgusting.”

  My mother beams, her fears temporarily allayed.

  Lothar growls in frustration. I feel bad for him. I slip him a meatball, but my mom sees me. “Charlotte! You will eat everything on that plate or so help me God, I’m making an appointment with your doctor next week.”

  I shrink down in my chair. “Jesus.”

  My dad just grabs the newspaper and spreads it out before him on the table. He’s in his happy place, checking to see if the obits are correct and that our ad in the back ran correctly.

  “Let’s play Guess the Dearly Departed,” he says, changing the subject. He holds up an obit picture of a young man in a suit and Brylcreemed hair. He looks sort of like Elvis. Dad’s thumb covers the name on the obit.

  This is a game that we’ve played since we were children. Since people tend to use photographs that are anywhere from forty to fifty years out-of-date, it’s interesting to try to match the photos in the paper to the stiffs downstairs. Sometimes it’s a challenge. The relatives of the Dearly Departed often submit old wedding photographs, military photographs, and sometimes posed portraits.

  “That’s Mr. Curtis,” Gramma says, twirling her pasta around her fork. “He was quite the handsome man back in the day.”

  “No kidding,” my mom agrees.

  The old photos are interesting. You can tell who they are if you see the eyes. Bodies wither, but the eyes never change. You can see it in the poster board collages that families bring to the parlor. Their eyes are always the same.

  I stuff my face full of pasta. “So, I was wondering…” I mumble, trying to be casual.

  “Mmm?” The light is glinting off my father’s glasses, and I can’t see the expression on his face over the edge of the paper.

  My heart hammers, and I swallow three times before I can get any words out. “I was wondering if I might be able to have a Halloween party this year.”

  My dad doesn’t move. My mom’s spoon clicks once on the plate and stills. Garth freezes in mid-slurp of his iced tea, and his eyes slide from me to my dad and back again. The expression on Garth’s face says it all: What the hell are you thinking?

  My dad takes the newspaper down, folds it in half, and places it beside his plate. He puts his elbows on the table and steeples his fingers over his hot spaghetti. The steam fogs his glasses. “Why would you think that would be a good idea?”

  I open my mouth, then close it. I try again: “It would be different this time. Really.”

  Garth snorts across the table from me and I kick him.

  My mother’s voice is tight. “We haven’t forgotten what happened last time. Nor has the checkbook fully recovered.”

  “It wouldn’t happen again. I swear,” I plead.

  “Let’s recap,” my dad says. “Last year, your mother and I went to the firefighters’ masquerade. Your grandmother was in Florida. We left you and your brother home, with the intention that you kids might—I don’t know—watch scary movies with the neighbor kids? Something appropriately festive.”

  “It was festive, all right,” Gramma snorts, reaching for the basket of garlic bread.

  I feel my face growing hot. “I didn’t plan for that to happen…”

  “Which part didn’t you plan to happen?” Mom is now tapping her fork against the edge of her plate. “Inviting a bunch of people over for a party?”

  “You didn’t say we couldn’t have friends over,” I say.

  “We said you could have a couple of friends over,” Mom points out. “Like maybe enough friends to sit around the coffee table, eat pizza, and scare yourselves witless trying to summon Cthulhu in the bathroom mirror. We didn’t say that you could have twenty people over, allow underage drinking, give people a tour of the morgue…”

  I slump in my chair.

  My mother’s voice becomes shriller: “Yes, I know that naked dead bodies are thrilling, but confidentiality is important, never mind the chain of evidence if we had a victim of a crime in there. And that is saying nothing of what happened to the hearse and the dearly departed Mr. Clark.”

  “That was epic.” Garth smirks. “Like, legendary.”

  I press the heels of my hands to my brows. The thing about the hearse was bad. A couple of kids made off with the hearse and wrecked it. The cops found Mr. Clark in a field, face-down in cow shit. After Sheriff Billings quietly returned the body to us, it was my job to correct the cow shit situation.

  “You did nothing to stop it,” my mother snaps at Garth. “You’re older. You were in charge.”

  Garth spreads out his hands. “Hey, what am I supposed to do about thirty kids who descended upon the house? I was outnumbered.”

  My mother’s eyes narrow. “Now it’s thirty?”

  “I don’t think you kids fully appreciate how much damage could have done to our business.” My dad frowns at us. “If it weren’t for Sheriff Billings doing us a professional favor, that could have been the end of everything.”

  “But what if you guys were here? You know, as chaperones.” I squeak.

  My father shakes his head. “I don’t think you fully get how big an issue this is and what a huge breach of trust that was.”

  Oh, I knew, all right. Before the party, Mom and Dad were willing to let me stay home and invite a few friends over.

  And now? I haven’t been left alone in a year. Seven-year-olds get more freedom than I do.

  “I…I understand, I do. It’s just…let me prove to you that I’ve learned.” I sigh and stare at my plate. I can’t form the words about how much this means to me, because it sounds petulant and stupid: I want to have a party so I can maintain some social credibility.

  “Not going to happen this year. End of discussion.” When Dad says a subject’s closed, it’s closed.

  I stab my meatball with a fork. For weeks after the party, I was a heroine. People who never would have spoken to me before were slapping my back at school. I even got asked out. After that, I got invited to parties, but since I was grounded forever, I could never go. It was like I was invisible before, and then people finally began to see me. I can feel myself sliding into invisibility again, as time passes and memory fades.

  From under the table, Lothar whines sympathetically. I surreptitiously slip him part of a meatball again. He gobbles it down and stares up at me adoringly.

  I know Lothar loves me for who and what I am. But, like people, he also likes me a lot better if I feed him.

  I have no way to feed the beast of my little social scene. If I don’t feed it, it will go away, and then I’ll be alone.

  *

  My mom would say that I’m sulking, but that’s not entirely accurate.

  I’m ruminating.

  I ruminate best when my hands are busy. Since I got all my homework done in study hall, I decide to drag out some of my old paints, but the acrylics have all dried up. So I open up a box of mostly broken charcoals. I spread out a piece of paper on the floor and draw while I’m thinking. The charcoal feels feather-light and foreign in my ha
nds; I’m too used to holding pencils and pens, things that feel more substantial. My strokes are small and timid, not grand, self-assured gesture lines like they once were. It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn. Probably not since my last art class in junior high. I liked art, a lot. I liked diving deep and closing everyone else out. But I know I can’t make a living doing this, no matter how much I doodle. It’s not, as my dad would say, “a real job.” I have to turn outward to survive, to learn to deal with other people.

  I don’t like this about myself—that I have this desire to be liked. I wish I didn’t give a damn, that I could be self-contained and just do my own thing. Apparently, I come from generations of people who did just that, though. Garth certainly got that gene, but I don’t want what they want. I want that warm glow of acceptance that only really comes from other people. I want the easy banter, the chance to connect. I don’t want to be sitting up here in my room for the rest of my life. I want to get out and see the world. With other people. You know, be on a team. Work with others to do something big. Maybe fall in love. But it’s like there’s a wall between them and me, and I can’t get around it. That wall is full of panic and awkwardness and that anxiety I’ve never been able to shake.

  I draw until the charcoal is a sliver that breaks in my hand. By this time, the light has drained out of the sky, and the only source of illumination is my bedside lamp.

  I sit back on my heels. My elbows ache from where I’ve propped myself up on the floor. When I rub my elbows, the black sooty charcoal leaves its mark.

  My drawing isn’t bad. It’s a bird, a big black bird with feathers. I intended it to look like a golden eagle, but looking at its face, it looks more like a turkey vulture.

  I consider wadding it up and throwing it away because it’s sort of ugly. Instead, I just fold it into quarters.

  I intend to stuff it into my trunk, along with all kinds of forgotten art projects, when I hear a scratching at the door.

  I open it to find Lothar whining, his ears cocked. He probably has to pee. I tug on my shoes, getting charcoal marks on the leather, and follow him down the stairs. As I pass the second floor, I can dimly hear my father snoring and the muffled sound of music from Garth’s enormous headphones. He has the bad habit of singing along with his music—off-key. Tonight, it sounds like hair-bands.

  Lothar thumps down the stairs to the first floor, his collar jingling and claws tapping on the steps. I open the door to the parlor floor, expecting him to run to the front door to be let out.

  But he does a U-turn and heads back down the hall.

  “Dammit, Lothar,” I groan. I rush after him, hoping that I can snag him before he starts chewing on Mr. Curtis’s arm again.

  But Lothar doesn’t run to the Green Room. He runs to the Body Shop. I flip on the buzzing fluorescent light to see Lothar standing in the middle of the tiled floor. The fur on his back is standing up, which is entirely ridiculous for a dachshund. His ears are pulled back, and he’s staring at the door to the refrigerated unit.

  “Lothar!” I hiss. I pick him up, and he squirms under my arm.

  Behind the stainless-steel door of the refrigerator, something scratches.

  My heart stops in my throat. I’m too old to be swayed by horror films and superstitious stories. We treat the dead respectfully, not out of fear, but out of moral duty. We do not, at any time, expect to have legions of undead come alive and bitch about their pedicures. I mean, there are some weird things that happen with the dead. Like rigor mortis, which can cause a prone corpse to sit straight up. The first experience with that is always fun. But the rest of the time, the Dearly Departed are pretty inert.

  I approach the cooler. We have a small walk-in cooler for my mom’s coroner work, like the kind that you see in the backs of restaurants that hold lettuce, butter, and uncooked hamburgers. We got ours second-hand from a chicken joint that failed a health department investigation. It was something about the chicken nuggets not being actual chicken, I think. Whatever the trouble was, the restaurant closed. My mom went to the auction and bought the cooler and a whole bunch of wire-rack shelving. When the bank that was doing the liquidation asked her what she wanted with the stuff, she gave them some non sequitur about doing a whole lot of baking and needing someplace to store the results of her work.

  I creep to the door of the cooler and press my ear to the cold metal. My breath fogs the stainless steel surface. Lothar leans against my leg. I listen for several heartbeats, hearing nothing.

  My own heart rate begins to slow. Maybe something just fell, or the squirrels in the attic have figured out an ingenious way to get into the vents. Either way, no emergency.

  Something smacks against the door with a wet, hard slap.

  I fall back on my butt and Lothar yips.

  My eyes narrow. That’s no squirrel.

  I scramble up to a crouch and reach for the door handle. With a jerk, I rip it open.

  The floater’s smell hits me first, like hot steam from a sewer in the summer. I force back a gag and smack on the light switch. Jerry-rigged electrical light flickers on overhead. The refrigeration unit is barely twenty-by-twenty feet, and doesn’t hold many customers. We just use the wire shelving to stack the Dearly Departed on until they get embalmed. I see two elderly folks in the corner, peaceful with their toe tags dangling.

  But I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about the floater. The body was wheeled in on a table, zipped up, to be analyzed later. Garth parked the gurney over the floor drain, so he wouldn’t make a big mess as the crud inevitably leaked from the zippers. The gurney is still there, with the bag atop it. Sort of.

  The bag is unzipped. But it shouldn’t be. I lean forward, fighting the urge to recoil against the smell. The body has slid half out of the bag, an arm protruding beyond the zipper and trailing down to the floor. The skin of the body is the color of asparagus and eggplant. I can’t tell if it’s male or female. It doesn’t even look human.

  I try to control my breathing. There’s all kinds of lore about being buried alive in the funeral home historical archives. Hell, in this part of the country, people used to be buried with bells to let people know if a mistake was made. But there’s no way that floater is anything but dead. And no way it could have tried to crawl out of its bag.

  I snatch some latex gloves from a dispenser on the wall. I approach the body. I stuff the arm back into the bag, looking away from the bits of rotting blond hair still clinging to the scalp. The Dearly Departed’s lips have drawn back from its teeth in a grimace. There’s a deep tear in the abdominal cavity that makes the torso look like a deflated piece of moldy fruit. The smell is so unbearable it makes my eyes water.

  I zip the bag back up, fastening it securely. Floaters are full of gas. Guessing by the bits of slime on the floor and the outflung arm, I suspect that intestinal gas built up in the Dearly Departed’s bowel and exploded. Good thing I wasn’t here to see it.

  I hear slurping. I look down to catch Lothar greedily licking the floor drain.

  “Lothar! God knows you could get salmonella or something worse.”

  Lothar grumbles. I strip off my gloves, chuck them in the trash can. I pick him up before he can find any more snacks and head to the door.

  But I stop in my tracks. The interior metal surface of the door should be dully shiny, brushed stainless steel. I Windex it once a week, after all. But the inside is covered with long, stringy green hand prints, as if something had been trying to get out.

  Impossible.

  “It’s just the intestinal gas,” I tell myself aloud. I haul Lothar out of there. I close the door. We usually never lock the door, but we do have a hasp to preserve the chain of evidence on any given case. I hunt down the padlock that fits the hasp and click it shut. I only hope somebody remembers the combination.

  I drag Lothar upstairs into the shower with me and scrub us both until I’m red and the water runs cold. I’m used to the dead. Really, I am. But there’s something about the floater downstairs
that chills me to the bone, that makes me want to sleep with the light on and the ferocious Lothar at the foot of my bed.

  Resentment churns through me. I hate that everyone else on that damn school bus doesn’t have to be afraid of the dark.

  I close my eyes, and unbidden memories of the Halloween party burble up.

  *

  I am the celebrated Queen of the Dead. Seriously. Ten times more popular than the prom Queen and twice as glamorous—for about five minutes. I’m on top of my own little world, right up until the exact moment that it comes crashing down around my ears and fully dressed corpses fall into the ditches.

  Murmurs of awe and nods of approval from the other kids swirl around me. I bask in it as I open the doors to the Body Shop to excited gasps and squeals, feeling like a magician on stage. For the first time in my life, I have something cool to show off. I’m so used to being the weird kid, the one from the weird family that everyone overlooks. But on this magical night, I’m somebody. It’s like I’m freaking Cinderella or something.

  Renee grabs my sleeve and drags me back into the hallway, away from the throng of teenagers pouring into the Body Shop. “I don’t like this,” she hisses.

  She’s always been honest with me, ever since her family moved a half-mile down the road. In fifth grade, she learned to recognize when I was having a panic attack. She’d haul me into a stall in the girls’ bathroom and force me to breathe in unison with her until I could speak normally. She’s my rock.

  My eyes dart to the group of kids in the doorway. I swallow. I’m afraid to admit that maybe I do like this. I feel a sharp thrill of pride. Where I live and what my parents do isn’t taboo right now. Somehow it has gained me acceptance, if just for a moment.

  “I’m gonna get Garth,” she says.

  I open my mouth to respond, but one of the girls shoves her way between me and Renee. She puts her hand on Renee’s shoulder and slams her back against the wall. Renee winces and gasps, and her long brown hair falls over her face, obscuring her expression.