“We’ll be your friends now. We’ll be your family too.”
“I should go.”
“We’re the only ones who can care for you.”
“I should go.”
“We’re the only ones that can know you.”
“Let her go already!” the old man barks, spittle flung from the corner of his mouth as he waves her away. “Let her see for herself what it’s like out there, now.”
They fall silent. The widow begins to back away from them and toward the doors, but makes it no farther than the step leading to the anteroom when she stills, all the while her eyes on theirs. She has a stepdaughter; she has friends; she drinks two cups of coffee in the morning as she does the crossword with a ballpoint pen. But she had a husband, then. So none of that could now be so.
“Perhaps I will stay,” the widow says. “For a little while.”
The old woman smiles. “Good,” she says, and nods in eager approval. “Good.”
So she stays. For a few minutes, and then for an hour, for the evening and then overnight, sleeping beside them beneath an oilskin tarpaulin on the cold and damp flagstones that pave the floor of the crypt. They wake her at dawn and lead her to the evergreen hedges abutting the high flat stone of the cemetery walls to collect chokeberries, which grow there in red clotted bunches, a gift of winter. They show her how they use barbed wire as snares to catch sparrows and pigeons, starlings and other birds too stupid or slow to fly south for the winter. She keeps expecting someone to come looking for her—her family, her friends, the police—but no one ever does.
She spends the day with them, and then another night, another morning and a new day, spent occupied with the daily business of acquiring food, of learning from the others the customs and rules of their strange and insular world. They melt frost in marble cisterns and drink from ornamental urns, the accoutrements of the dead refashioned for the needs of the living. But isn’t it all for the living? The widow casts her eyes across the snow-blanketed graves. The coffins and tombstones, the ritual pyres and monumental obelisks … What do the dead care, anymore?
Most wonderful of all, there’s no need for the widow to speak of her husband, for any of them to speak of their husbands, or the old man of his wife. It’s enough for them to be together in their grief. Their simple companionship abates the pain of her loss more than she would have ever thought possible.
Early on the morning of the third day, they finish stealing candles from the small chapel near the gates when they come upon a pair of parka-clad workers digging a fresh grave on the south side of the cemetery. The widow, exposed to them in the bright light of day, scuttles behind the obscuring limbs of a weeping willow, but the others continue undaunted along the path toward the mausoleum that is their home. The gravediggers fail to acknowledge them, and after some time she realizes that the workers take no notice of them whatsoever.
“Why don’t they see us?” she asks the others once she’s caught up with them.
The old woman shrugs. “They don’t want to see us, I suppose. It’s too … difficult for them.”
“They don’t have any skin in the game,” the old man says, and hocks a dark yellow loogie into the thick paste of snow. “They might as well work at a bank.”
“Once the funeral is over, they move on. Everyone does. But not us.” The old woman smiles her bright warm smile, but this time there’s something sorrowful in it, which feels just right.
By the seventh day, the end of shiva, the widow rarely thinks of the life that awaits her at her former home, doesn’t even remember more than a vague outline of what she ever did with her time. Where did I work? she wonders. Was it at an office building? Or was it some kind of school? By the ninth day it’s like walking through a waking dream: she no longer recalls her stepdaughter’s age, or the color of her hair, and soon the girl’s name is lost to her altogether, along with the general features of her face. All she remembers now is her husband, and she clings to his memory like a talisman, a lantern in the dark of night. It’s all she has left to hold.
She knows it’s because of her new friends. They understand her, in a way others are unable, and she knows this to be true because she understands them the same way. The widow knows that by staying with them—by haunting the hallowed grounds of the cemetery and living off what grows here, and alights here, and is fed by the flesh and marrow of the departed—that she needn’t move on, not ever. Because some people never do.
By the tenth day in the cemetery, however, the pain of her husband’s absence returns unabated. It surges like a cresting wave and crashes over her, bringing her back to that awful phone call, that moment that ushered her unwillingly into the midnight realm of unmitigated despair. I can’t breathe, she thinks, I’ll never breathe again, and she runs the familiar distance from the crypt down the hill to the family plot, where her husband’s grave, as with the rest, is buried in white. Her chapped pink hands dig at the wet ground, her tears pocking the snow. It’s only once she’s made her way to the hard dirt below that she stops to wonder whether she’s trying to dig her husband out of his resting place or make a grave for herself to crawl into, where she can lie down and pull the earth around her like a shroud. Even the accusation of her stepdaughter’s face begins to return, the dark almond eyes the girl shared with her father, the single dimple in her right cheek. She has abandoned her husband’s daughter, as she herself has been abandoned. She wants to die.
And what truth this is! As true as the aim of the steering column that had impaled her husband in his twisted metal cage, the one they needed the Jaws of Life to free him from, though there would be no life for him, not anymore. Twelve days gone since the phone call from the police, the race to the hospital to bear witness to his mangled body, her knuckles white against the steering wheel of her own car as she tried to wish it undone the way she had wished Tinkerbell back to life as a little girl, one among many at a crowded matinee clapping her hands at the screen so hard she was sure her numbed fingers would bleed.
Has it been only twelve days? Impossible. Surely it has been months. Twelve days? No. She couldn’t do this. No. She could not. Never.
“You can,” the old woman says at her side, all three of them here now, her friends. “You will.”
“How?” The widow wipes away tears and peers down at the pathetic little pit she’s carved. “How can I keep from wanting it to be over, every second of every hour?”
The old woman looks to the man, who slowly nods, just once, his head drooping so that his pallid chin touches the immaculate Windsor knot in his tweed necktie. He looks to the young woman, who nods once herself, the air crisping with electric tension.
“We have a trick that helps.” The old woman steps closer, her stale breath carried on the wind. “Would you like us to show you?”
That night after their rounds they trail back inside the crypt, back to the central round chamber, the widow entering last of all. The young woman lights the arrangement of ledge candles, one after the next, as the temple-like room takes on the eerie half-flame of a winter hearth. The old man clears their last meal’s detritus from the granite slab to help the old woman as she lowers herself down upon the tomb.
The old man and the young woman gather on either side of her prone form, the pair tugging back the old woman’s tatty black shawl. They unbutton her blouse and lower it, unfasten her nude-colored brassiere and shimmy it out from beneath her, peeling off the rest of her mourning attire until she is naked upon the slab. The old woman crosses her arms over her breasts and closes her eyes, as if she herself is laid out in death’s final repose.
All along the woman’s body are painted intricate black circles. Of varying size and shape, the patterns run up and down her sides in erratic intervals, appearing to spot her the way a leopard’s coat is spotted, dark swirls patching her sagging and distended skin.
Mesmerized, the widow steps forward. Inches away now, and she can see at last that they aren’t inked-on designs, but are in fact suppura
ted wounds, the size of bite marks. Just as soon as she realizes this fact a festering smell hits her, and she staggers back gasping from the slab.
“What is this?” the widow asks, and covers her nose and mouth with a trembling hand.
“This,” the old man says, “is the trick.”
The widow stares at the young woman, who remains silent as ever, only nodding gravely as she lowers herself to her knees beside the older woman’s prostrate figure. Without taking her eyes off the widow, the young woman lifts the older woman’s arm, brings it to her mouth, and sinks her teeth into its spongy flesh, the aged brown parchment of skin bruising and blooding a deeper shade of red.
“My God,” the widow whispers. “Why?”
“This is our sacrament,” the old woman says from the slab, eyes still shut though her parted lips quiver as if jolted by an electric current. “This is the holy of holy, the flesh that binds us together.”
“Take of her,” the old man says, so close his rotted breath masks the scent of the old woman’s wounds. “Take of her flesh and blood, so that you may strengthen grief’s resolve. It’s the only way, now.”
“I … can’t. I can’t.” She wipes away tears and retreats for the doors, wedges her chaffed fingers into the narrow space between them and wrenches them open, ready to flee into the darkness. No one tries to stop her.
But looking out at the pale tombstones that litter the dim night like scattered teeth, she hesitates. It’s because she knows she cannot face the outside world, not anymore. She cannot face anyone who had ever known her before. She needs to be with her own kind, now.
The widow eases the doors shut, a whinnying grind of iron on stone as she turns back to face them. A thrill prickles her skin, an admixture of terror and fascination as she walks the length of the antechamber and back inside the domed sepulcher, where they wait for her in their strange tableau.
She lowers herself beside the slab. “Show me how it’s done.”
The young woman wipes her mouth and points with a blood-flecked finger at the old woman’s free arm. The widow lifts it, bringing the hand toward her. The smell of the old woman’s lesions is gone now, replaced by that of snuffed-out candles, as well as a holier scent, sandalwood, perhaps. The widow finds an unblemished section of skin along the inside of the old woman’s papery wrist, brings it to her lips, and sinks her teeth into the flesh.
The taste is revolting, and also extraordinary; it reminds her of her first taste of tomato, of being a young girl and plucking one from her grandmother’s garden vines, sliding its tough membrane across her lips before biting down. How surprising the spurting of its contents, the strong perfumy taste of life-blood and liquefied meat, and she retches now as she did then.
But even as she raises her head from where she is sick beside the slab and stares up at them—the looming old man, the wide-eyed young woman, the mutilated older one whose death mask of a face remains still, save the tears spilling from her closed eyes—even as she wants to scream and run from them and die from anguish and sorrow and the guilt of abandoning her stepdaughter, she knows that she will not.
She will not scream. She will not run away. She will stay, and she will eat. And she will live. Without her stepdaughter, who is better off without the burden of the widow’s annihilative grief. She will live without her husband. But for him. For him.
“Think of him as you eat of me,” the old woman whispers, her eyes still closed tight. “Think of him, and the pain begins to slip away, like braised meat off the bone.”
The widow grimaces, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth as she swallows back a bit of fleshy gristle, the taste of it like tomato skin. She lowers her skull to the old woman’s arm, and bites down again, more.
This she could do. Yes. She could. Forever, even. Yes.
On the seventeenth day, they take of the old man. Of his chalky white skin and sinewy flesh, his tough hide and enlarged veins, a thin cord of muscle snagging in the widow’s teeth before she manages to swallow it down. He doesn’t remain still the way the old woman had, but rather hums and rocks from side to side as the three women feed upon him, their shadows expanding and contracting against the curved walls of the crypt like their own set of dark wounds. “Think of him as you eat of me,” the old man whispers and groans, the scent of sandalwood permeating the musty air. “Think of him. Think of him.”
And so she does. Of her husband’s coppery thick beard and wire-rim spectacles, his swollen gut that he used to take in his two large hands and cradle as if it were a baby. The old man’s blooded flesh travels fast through her system, and she feels a calm she hasn’t known in memory.
On the twenty-fourth day, they eat of the young woman. She whimpers as the old woman suckles at her thigh, her little hands pressed over her mouth as if trying to keep something down herself. The widow feels a tremor of unease. But didn’t she see for herself how the young woman had given herself over? Submission is a precept of faith, the old woman had said, what the widow’s own people would call a mitzvah, or even tikkun olam. Think of him, she reminds herself, and crouches beside the old man to taste of the young woman’s bony shoulder, the meat soft beneath its warm baste of blood. Think of him. And she does.
The thirtieth day arrives. The end of shloshim, the traditional period of mourning, the one her mother had practiced, and her mother’s mother before her. Back from the chokeberry shrubs she walks weaving through the maze of gravestones, the snow reduced to patches, the sun bright overhead with a faint blossoming scent in the air. Spring is on its way to Gravesend Cemetery at last.
Just as she reaches the turnoff to the crypt, she catches the unmistakable sound of liturgy on the wind, and she slows, a small service taking place on the other side of the road. A Greek one, she believes, the priest droning on in his own devotional recitations, the way her rabbi had in his. A few dozen mourners are arranged around the priest, around the square hole dug into the earth and framed by too-bright AstroTurf meant to conceal the fresh grave dirt scattered upon the soft ground. None of them see her standing there. Not the priest or the cemetery workers, the mourners or even the dead. She is but a ghost among them, something so raw and terrible the brain stutters upon sight of her, the eye failing to alight before it quickly flits away.
But then one of them looks up, and she starts: a salt-and-pepper-haired man not terribly much older than herself, but with the prematurely aged face and shocked hollow expression of a widower. His glazed eyes narrow and blink, and they stare at each other, the world falling silent of prayer. I see you, she thinks, and nods slowly before she moves on. I see you. She wonders if he’ll be lucky enough to find his way to the crypt, or if the outside world will force him into its plastic and deadening embrace, all platitudes and hopeful falsities. Sometimes it’s better not to be seen.
She smells the incense the moment she opens the doors to the crypt, that same perfumy scent that seemed to arise from nowhere each time they took of one another. It was as if the very act had caused some unaccountable pheromone to be secreted from beneath the skin, either the consumer or the consumed. Today, she thinks. It must be the day for me to submit to them, so that their own pain might be eased in turn. Today.
But when she passes through the narrow antechamber and enters the main room of the crypt, she’s surprised to see the granite slab is already taken. A large figure lies upon it, swathed crown to toe in a tachrichim, which reminds the widow of nothing so much as a last-minute Halloween costume, someone playing at being a ghost.
The others are gathered around the slab, their eyes upon her, watchful. You see me, she thinks, and steps forward to join them.
“Go on,” the old man says, and chins toward the head of the shrouded figure. Who else has joined us, then? It never occurred to her before that there would ever be five of them. The widow leans over, and begins to unwrap the dressing.
Even before she has the linen undone, she knows. But still she must see to be sure. She pulls down the folds of the shro
ud to find his coppery red hair, and only a bit more, only a bit, his skin a dead and dark shade of charcoal around the sunken pits of black and unidentifiable matter where her husband’s eyes once were, but no longer are. She finds she cannot breathe.
“You must take of him.” The old woman’s voice is like a rock hurled against the widow’s breast. “To be bound to him forever. The way you’ve been bound to us.”
“This is the night feast,” the old man says, “the feast of last partings. The final sacrament of the oldest funerary rites, passed down but occulted from one culture to the next. We have set the table in the sacred space, so that you too might become a part of greater things. This is our gift to you, in the manner we have been gifted by others.”
“No.” The widow pulls the cloth back over her husband’s too-bright hair. “No. I won’t do it. Not to him.” She looks to the young woman, who only bows her head, whether in prayer or shame it’s unclear.
“There must be a feast,” the old woman says. “And there must be one tonight.” The kindness gone from her wizened face, she rears up from the floor and takes hold of the shroud in two clawlike hands and begins to tug it away. The widow pulls her husband toward herself, and the old woman pulls him back, the corpse rocking between them as if undecided.
She finally reaches over the slab and shoves the old woman, who stumbles against the wall of the crypt, toppling a shelf of candles, the shroud still grasped in one fist. The uncovered body goes with her. It tumbles from the back of the slab, only the briefest glimpse of its hideous decomposition as it falls mercifully into the shadows with a dull thunk.
The widow hurries toward the doors. The old man and young woman are soon upon her, however, dragging her back by her hair and wrestling her toward the slab as they pull away her long coat, her own shroud of winter these past thirty days. The old man thrusts her down onto the cold granite, her head slamming against it so hard she blacks out.
But not for long enough. She awakens moments later to a nighttime sea of imagined stars, dancing about her mind. There is a disturbing sensation of icy breath across her naked belly, followed by an acute stabbing upon her inner thigh, where they’re already beginning to take.
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