Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  But I can’t take the real thing. It’s not mine. I shut my eyes against this terrible feeling of wanting.

  I turn on my heel to flee, without looking back.

  *

  I can’t get that artifact out of my head. Whenever I close my eyes, it’s like the image is burned in the backs of my eyelids. My thumb unconsciously traces the outline of it in my palm, remembering the coolness of the bone. More than once, I consider sneaking back to steal the artifact. But there’s no way I can escape the notice of the rest of the group, as we are corralled to sit on the floor and listen to Civil War re-enactors discuss the intricacies of their costumes. Pretending to take notes, I sneak peeks at the rubbings I’ve done, accidentally smearing the graphite.

  It’s magic, somehow. I know it deep in my marrow.

  But there’s nothing to be done for it. I expect to shake the spell of it when we leave the museum, but it lingers the rest of the day. On the bus on the way home, my breath makes ghosts on the glass. Idly, with my finger, I doodle the crude shape of a catfish.

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  I glance up, startled. Kaitlyn has slid into the bus seat beside me. Two of the other girls from the cross-country team bounce in the seat in front of me, gazing backward. I yank my finger away from the glass.

  “Hi.” My voice feels sticky in my throat.

  “So did you find out about the party?” Kaitlyn leans closer to me. Her shoulder presses against mine conspiratorially, and a smile plays across her pink lips.

  “Um. I asked but…my parents said no.”

  Kaitlyn’s brows draw together. “I mean, are they even gonna be home?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure they’re going to be watching me like a hawk after last year…” My voice falters.

  Disappointed groans sound from the seat in front of me. I catch someone muttering about the “Ghoul Girl.” I wince.

  Kaitlyn shrugs. “It’s okay. Really.”

  But I know it’s not. I know it as I feel them pulling away, chattering about other possible plans, like going to the river to drink or throwing a party in a barn if it’s too cold outside. I feel invisible, like I could sink right through the vinyl and sharp springs of the seat and disappear.

  When the bus stops at my driveway, I keep my head down. I know that the news of the nonexistent party has flowed to the back of the bus already. I don’t want to meet anyone’s eyes, and I skitter down the steps to the gravel.

  Relief washes over me when the bus pulls away. It’s over. Maybe they’ll focus on something else. Something that I’m not included in.

  I kick at pieces of gravel with my shiny sandals. Dirt squishes up between my toes, but I don’t care. I take my time wandering up to my front door. I fumble in my pocket for my keys, and something falls out.

  I reach down to pick it up, and my breath congeals in my throat.

  The carved face of the catfish looks up at me, gnawing on his bone. The artifact from the museum.

  My heart thunders and my palms sweat.

  I’m a thief. I must be. But I know I put the artifact back. So how did it end up here?

  I am terrified that I don’t remember taking it. There has to be something wrong with me. There is no other rational explanation. Unless…

  It’s mine. It wants to be mine. Which is even crazier than assuming I forgot I took it.

  Still, I’m thrilled to feel it in my palm. I jam it back in my pocket and, with shaking hands, unlock the front door and rush up to my room, as if someone is watching me. I put the charm in an empty candy box in my bedside drawer. The box smells like chocolate, and the charm nestles there with bits of clear quartz, a broken earring, and a quail feather I found, curled in on itself in a spiral.

  My heart pounds, and my breath squeaks in my throat. The beginnings of a panic attack are creeping up on me.

  I dig deeper in the drawer for a prescription pill bottle. I pop out two tablets and swallow them dry. It has been awhile since I’ve felt the need to take my meds. Generalized anxiety disorder, my doctor calls it. I feel socially anxious, sure. But maybe something is wronger than that. Something really wrong. If I can take something without recalling it…

  I press my fists to my temples.

  Dammit. What if someone knows I took this thing? What if I got caught on some security camera, or if someone saw me, or…?

  I think I should probably go talk to my mom about this. She’ll go into total nuclear meltdown. But maybe I can just suggest that I need to go back to the doctor for a sports physical, like I did last time. That way, my anxiety is just between the doctor and me, and she’s not hovering and fretting over it.

  I suck in my breath. I kick off my painful sandals and stuff my feet into tennis shoes, ignoring the red marks on my heels and tops of my feet. I clomp down the stairs, trying to figure out how to have a nonchalant conversation about this.

  The house feels really silent. I wonder if my family went to the store or if they’re all just working. I know there’s a funeral tomorrow, and somebody has to go pick up the flowers. I head out to the main part of the house and poke my head into the parlor. Mr. Curtis’s coffin is shut, likely against the advances of Lothar. The vases are empty, but the chairs have been set up in rows.

  I head back to the Body Shop. Light gleams from under the door. I shove it open, starting to say something…

  …but my words immediately die on my tongue.

  My mother is lying on the floor. The white material of her hazmat suit is splattered with brown goo. Lothar is beside her, licking her face.

  “Mom!”

  I fall to my knees next to her. She’s breathing, and her pulse is fast, but when I brush the back of her neck with my hand, it comes away with blood on it.

  I look right, then left. The door to the refrigeration unit is open, leaking cold air. The back door is open, too, banging against a metal table.

  I scramble to my feet for the phone and call 911.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I’m a doctor, dammit.”

  My mother sits on the edge of her steel coroner’s slab, her feet swinging like a kid’s in footie pajamas. One paramedic dabs at the back of her neck with gauze, while another checks the dilation of her eyes with a little flashlight.

  “You should really go to the hospital,” the first paramedic says. The paramedics who responded are actually Jenn’s parents. This far out, we have a volunteer fire department, and Jenn’s mom and dad came directly in from their jobs at the propane station. They smell faintly of the mercaptan in the gas.

  “I’m fine. It’s just a minor concussion.” My mom rubs her neck.

  Sheriff Billings strokes his Vicks-covered pornstache and frowns at his notebook. “You didn’t see what happened?”

  “No.” My mom shakes her head and winces. “I opened up the cooler, then the phone rang. I turned to pick it up and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor.”

  Garth, who arrived when Sheriff Billings did, comes out of the refrigeration unit. “Bad news, folks. The floater is gone.”

  Mom’s brows draw together. “The floater?”

  “Yeah,” my brother says with a nod. “The floater.”

  I grimace. “Who would want the floater?”

  “Maybe the person or persons who put the floater in the river to begin with.” The Sheriff’s gaze narrows, and I can see him thinking behind his blue eyes.

  My mom slumps over. “I was just getting ready to do the autopsy on it. I have…no evidence to share with you.”

  The Sheriff pats her arm, then pulls his hand away and wipes it on his pant leg. “I can’t imagine that someone could stand to touch that stinking mess, much less put it in a vehicle. I’ll get somebody in here to dust for prints. But whoever it is, they can’t have gotten far.”

  My mom nods morosely.

  “It’ll be okay, Mom,” I say. I shift Lothar around in my arms. I wish he could talk, so he could tell us what happened.

  Instead, he just looks up at me with a trace of fetid
green slime around his lips.

  *

  I can’t sleep. No one in our house can, even though all the doors are locked.

  For the first time that I can remember, my dad’s taken the shotgun out from under my parents’ bed when it isn’t deer season. He gives my brother and me another tutorial on how to use it. Gramma is unfazed, brandishing a gun from her closet that looks like it belongs to Mad Max.

  “What’s with the hand cannon, Gramma?” Garth asks.

  “It was your grandfather’s.” Gramma’s eyes narrow as she loads it. “Nobody comes in here and tries to hurt my babies. Nobody.”

  “Gramma,” I say. “Please don’t get worked up. Your heart.”

  She snorts and continues to push bullets into the cylinder. “My heart is fine. Stop mollycoddling me.”

  My dad frowns. I know he feels bad, because he and Gramma were at the florist when everything with Mom went down. My dad is not one of those strutting alpha dudes, by any stretch of the imagination. But I am reminded of when I was little and someone tried to burglarize the house. My dad heard breaking glass and went downstairs with the shotgun. He scared the guy off, then blasted all the tires on his pickup to ribbons on rims. The Sheriff was able to figure out who it was pretty quickly—a former neighbor. My dad is like that. When he’s pissed, he runs cold, not hot.

  He ratchets the shotgun. “This sound has stopped more violence than any other. Sometimes, this is all it takes. Just the threat of it.”

  I believe him. Or, at least I want to. I want to believe that my dad will chase off all the things that go bump in the night and that I can sleep soundly under my covers.

  But I can’t.

  I slip the bone charm from the museum under my pillow and rub my thumb over the surface. I don’t know what kind of bone it’s made of, but it’s soothing. Like a worry stone. I rub the charm some more. Talking to my mom about my museum theft or things banging around the cooler doesn’t feel so urgent anymore.

  Throughout the house, I start at every sound. Garth’s watching television in his room below. I can’t tell if he’s awake, or if he’s fallen asleep before the drone. I hear my parents’ voices occasionally, murmuring. Gramma’s sleep apnea even catches up with her. She snores, stops, and starts again in fits. Someone—my father, I assume—gets up every hour to walk the floors. Even the squirrels in the attic seem to fidget.

  When I do fall asleep, I dream of the river, flooding. Everything is dark, and the only sound is rushing water. Something is chewing at my feet from below, and something from above is tearing at my hair. My flesh separates from my bones, like an overcooked roast, and my scream is lost in the roar of the river.

  I wake up in the darkness, staring at the ceiling with my ears ringing.

  *

  I have a secret identity.

  Today, I am the Tissue Fairy.

  Well, it’s not so secret. But it does feel like a completely different part of myself. I’m dressed in a modest black dress and black closed-toe shoes. My hair is braided away from my face, and my makeup is done in soft pink hues. I drift through Mr. Curtis’s funeral, making sure that the ever-disappearing pens for the guest book are replenished and silently placing boxes of tissues in hot spots around the parlor—any place where the weeping reaches a crescendo or where a clot of people has formed. I always make sure that there’s a box unobtrusively placed in an empty seat in each of the first three rows, where the heavy criers always sit. The easy part about being the Tissue Fairy is that I never have to actually talk.

  This funeral is a very ordinary one. Mr. Curtis lies peacefully in his coffin with his hands clasped over his chest, a rosary trickling over his fingers. Flowers surround him. The local florist has done her best to make each arrangement a little bit different, in addition to the standard white roses, ferns, and baby’s breath that we always order. My father works the room in his dark suit, offering condolences. The air conditioning is turned way up to assure the freshness of the Dearly Departed as much as for the comfort of a large group of people in suits and conservative dresses in such a small space. I tug down my sleeves, but the AC isn’t the only thing making me shiver. I can’t get yesterday’s bizarre events out of my head.

  To distract myself from the uneasy feeling that’s settled into my chest, I try to pick out the spouse and family members. A few small children roam under a mother’s watchful eye, too young to understand what’s happening. The mother tries to distract them with candy. I pick out Mr. Curtis’s wife pretty easily. She’s in the center of a knot of people, her gnarled fingers shredding a dry tissue. Her hair is immaculate, and she’s wearing a very loudly-patterned purple dress.

  Garth leans beside me in the doorway.

  “How’s Mom?” I ask.

  “She’s upstairs, pissed off. She won’t come down with that bruise on her face, afraid that people will think Dad beats her. Gramma is making her some chicken soup and telling her that the Sheriff will catch the guy who took her science project.”

  I roll my eyes. Mom is suspicious of everyone and everything. She assumes the worst, and assumes that everyone else does, too.

  I glance at the fold-out poster board set-up that the family has assembled of photos of Mr. Curtis’s life. It’s funny—he’s in the background of all the pictures, playing with the children, making sandcastles, or watching television. I feel sad, imagining his painted toenails underneath his socks. I don’t think his wife knows. If she does, she’s sure putting on a good show.

  “Promise me that when I die, you won’t do any of this,” Garth says.

  I make a face. “You’re going to live just as long as I will.”

  “I just want to be stuck in the dirt. None of this pomp and circumstance. I’ll be beyond caring.” He flips over the prayer booklet that the minister is going to use.

  “You’ll be in heaven, racing hearses with the angels?”

  “No,” he says. “I’ll be taking a dirt nap, feeding the worms.”

  I give him a shove. I don’t want to believe that. I want to believe that there is a happy afterlife, that we will all be reunited with Gramps. I don’t remember much about him, since he died when I was five. All I remember about his funeral was being lifted up to peer into the casket, and seeing a man with a long beard. I can’t recall the color of his eyes.

  Garth thinks I’m naïve, but I want to believe in something beyond this. All of this. I want to believe that this isn’t preening and posturing, that there can be real love and real community. And a heaven to sort it all out in afterward, if there’s not enough time here to get it right.

  Garth and I don’t stay for the service. We get into Mom’s SUV with the trailer hitched up and head out to the gravesite in advance of the mourners. There are always preparations to be made before my father comes rolling in at the head of the funeral procession in the freshly waxed hearse: setting up the tent, rolling out the fake grass blanket, inspecting the concrete grave liner.

  I make sure that the chairs are set up. I took a head count at the funeral and add a few extra from the trailer. There’s usually a degree of attrition between the service and the interment. Nobody wants there to be empty chairs, but no one wants to stand. I’ve been guessing correct numbers since I was twelve.

  When our work is finished, Garth and I sit in the back row of chairs and wait. The sun is warm on my face, but I bury my hands in my pockets as a chill seeps up from the metal chairs. The catfish charm is there, rolling between my fingers. I survey the graveyard as I do. It’s getting pretty full in here. There are only two rows left in the back of the cemetery. Most of them, I know, have been sold. This is a pretty nice cemetery, and quite old. There are Civil War generals buried here. Some of the tombstones are broken and illegible, the memory of the Dearly Departed erased. A circle of huge oak trees stands silent sentinel in the middle. I suppose that there’s always more land. More land to bury more dead, ad infinitum.

  “So you don’t want any of this?” I ask him.

  “Not a bi
t of it.”

  “Cremation, maybe?”

  “Eh. Maybe. Would you keep my ashes?”

  I make a face. “I’d put your ashes in something ridiculous, like a cookie jar. Something to scare the kids.”

  “Nice.” He smiles.

  “You don’t want the funeral or even the burial…but you want to work around it for the rest of your life?” I genuinely want to know. I can’t make it fit.

  He shrugs. “I think I’ve seen enough of it to know what it really is. I like parts of it. The idea that we’re doing something for people that they can’t do for themselves. Helping.”

  I turn the charm over in my fingers. “You make it sound like…” I falter.

  “Like it’s sort of noble? I think it is.” He squints down the road. “It’s sort of like being a midwife, but in the opposite direction. A psychopomp.”

  “What?”

  “Someone who escorts the dead to the underworld.”

  “You don’t believe in the underworld,” I point out. “Neither heaven nor hell.”

  “We’re literally putting them underground. That’s a good enough metaphor for me.” He glances at me with his penetrating dark gaze. “You don’t want any part of this, do you?”

  I sigh, staring down at the grave dust on my shoes. I don’t want to insult him, or any of my family, but I don’t feel the need to serve this way singing in my blood. “No. I don’t want it.”

  “So what are you gonna do with yourself?”

  I frown. “Maybe I’ll go to med school. Be a doctor. I think that would be acceptable to Mom, don’t you?” I don’t say that I’d rather be holed up in a garret, drawing.

  “You can do anything you want. Just make sure it’s what you want.” My brother shades his eyes with his hand at the sound of gravel crunching. The hearse winds through the narrow lanes of the cemetery, its purple flags flapping. “It’s Showtime.”

  I stand, smoothing my skirt. “Let’s get the flowers.”

  Dad parks the hearse. We unload the flowers from the car, and I place them on their easel stands around the hole in the ground. My father directs the pallbearers where to set the coffin. When the flowers are arranged, Garth and I walk down the narrow lane to make sure that everyone has parking and to offer an arm to the elderly folks who need help getting to the gravesite. We usually keep the area nearest the grave marked off with cones for people with disability placards. We run out of room and I get to direct traffic, sending the overflow to the nearby church parking lot.