Thank you to those who have been reading along. Updates to come, and past posts can be found: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.
-August
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Part V
Since the reservation, a sliver of hope warmed me. Maybe one day it would show me kindness. Maybe it would hold me and keep me warm. But that silver was not bright enough, or strong enough to truly keep me warm. I wanted to give up, to accept a life of being haunted. I started to adapt, I used coffee to keep me warm and cigarettes to light my soul. Often, I’d chain smoke their existence - right down to the filter. Laughter with friends reminded me of the time before.
Emily and I soon started dating. Her smile, laughter, and beauty were enough to distract me from the glimpses of green I saw in the mirror. Her warm touch on my back rushed away its cold hands. I was okay with never seeing the monster’s gold light, she oozed honey and light with each syllable. I worried about its eventual impact on her. Her warmth and its cold were at a constant war. It seemed as though sometimes she bared the entire weight of my icy existence. A part of me dreaded it hurting her in order to prevent the halo of safety and relief that she provided.
The funeral home started helping the coroner’s office. We would be dispatched to the locations of unexpected deaths. This change of services came when the covid deaths had slowed. Business was suffering and every employee felt the dent in our paycheck. Leading some, like Elijah, to depart the funeral home. I stayed, not knowing how to move forward without being enveloped with cold. It was so normal by then - the jabs in my back, shoulders, legs. But every poke in my spine felt inherently novel.
Helping the coroner meant stress, having to be on scene within 30 minutes of the initial dispatch. It also meant being more acquainted with real death. Despite my encounter with the seven fingered mormon, real death was hard to come by at my funeral home. Our calls are mostly limited to elderly men and women in sterile nursing homes. Those who had fought cancer only to pass in the comfort of their bed, surrounded by loving members of their family.
When real death did come to us, it was delivered. Those who die in violent or unexpected ways require the investigation of the coroner, usually meaning an autopsy. In my state the coroner’s investigation is normally initiated by a 911 call, or welfare check. The pronouncement of the dead on scene initiated the corners’ interns arrival. They carry bags filled with cameras, sample vials, and sample swabs. All of which used to collect clues to help the real coroner discover the cause of one’s death. After the intern completed their investigation, they called a local funeral home to help transport and store the body until the state mortuary could pick up and transfer the deceased to the large coroner’s office located in my state’s most urban city. The funeral home would then help the intern place the body in a starkly white body bag, that would be sealed with an industrial orange tag marked with the dead’s name, and case number. The funeral home would transfer the body to their respective storage center, and the dead would be collected late into the night by a refrigerated semi.
Our funeral home had not worked with the coroner’s office for years. Our interaction with those violent deaths came when the bodies were finally released from the care of the state. Their deaths had been determined, they could be returned home. The semi would drop the body off at our funeral home, if the family had decided to use our services. The white bags that marked them in our fridges, sealed with the orange tag, were a sign of a rarity, mystery, or a treasure. Inviting the curious to explore its contents.
Sometimes they revealed bright green flesh, sickly sweet heat swirling out of the bag. Other times, a chest cavity filled with red biohazard bags, a chest loosely sewed shut. Sometimes, just the bones. A person missing for far too long, their skin shrunken around their skull. It’s astounding how little a person weighs when their body and soul have melted away.
The bags were both unexpected and unknown to me. I avoided them, on principle. For me they didn’t invite mystery, as they did for my coworkers. They were instead an invitation of green: reflected eyes and bruises alike. My boss would order me to cut the orange tag, and I’d always oblige. Its hands would wrap around the scissor handles, its bone cold fingers slicing my latex-free powdered gloves. I’d shake, the cold thrashing me as always. I would unzip the body bags with as much care and grace as I could muster. My teeth would pierce through my lip, drawing red, hot, thick blood - another way I had found to keep the cold away. The bag would open, the sweet would sting my eyes. The boss would order another mundane task, ranging from obtaining fingerprints, to cleaning them in preparation for an embalming. White bags also meant whispers.
I’d snip the tag, “Don’t,” unzip the bag, “Turn,” hold the dead’s hand, “Around,” clean their face, “Don’t,” move them in their fridge slot, “turn,” lift them up onto the silver bed, “around,” then lower them down into cold.
Every time I dealt with and took care of the violent markings of the dead, it would take out revenge on me. I’d remove my black gloves and the yellow plastic dress I draped over my clothes. I’d go to the bathroom to scrub my hands, trying to remove the stench of death. I tried my best to never look up, to not face myself in the mirror. But its hands would always brace around my skull, its fingernails drawing dots of blood down my neck. Itd shove my face towards the crystalline surface. Id gaze into my eyes, their own shade of green, nestled into the blacked sockets of my own. I wondered if I was starting to resemble it, my face skeletal in nature - the skin pale white like its own bone. I tried not to look. I really did. But the longer I waited in my own persistence - the tighter its hands grew. I could bear the pain, but the cold daggers it sent directly into my bones was unmanageable. Id slowly raise my eyes to meet its eyes, they glowed their neon green. It would remove its hands, and my head would calm its storm of pain.
I waited for the crack - hairline fractures along the frame of the mirror. There was one for each body I unveiled. My boss thought that they collected rust, brown flaking dots that rained down when we dusted. I knew it was blood, mine perhaps. Or maybe that of the forgotten. The snapping noise erupted, I looked for the crack. This one shined in the bottom left corner of the mirror. It would slam me forward, the sink hitting and bruising my hip bones. I wondered if my own bones had matching hairline fractures, they whined in pain as though they did. It would then disappear as though it was never there in the first place.
I was thankful for the absence of its leaving, and the relief of its silence, I felt drunk off of it. Sometimes I looked forward to the pain it brought towards my skull knowing it would make the peace an even greater reward. We hit our heads with hammers because of how good it feels when we stop.
I was less than thrilled to start attending to the unattended. My fear at what it would do, at how the voice would grow. My back, thighs, wrists, and neck already showed its punitive grips. I had been smacked into tables, pinned to my bed in the dark, I watched as it scared my friends. (I don’t care how beautiful Elijah and Emily had called it; I know it had been messing with our radio - hurting my sweet Emily’s stomach)
What more was it capable of? What would seeing the violent afterthoughts of the forgotten bring? If the mere unveiling of their white bags would lead to its violent ringing in my head, cracked mirrors, chipped teeth - what more would it do?
The firsts calls were uneventful, mirroring that of a standard descendant transfer. The deaths were from hospice patients beginning their journeys, ones that had not set up the proper care to remove the signature of a coroner on a death certificate.
I was walking to the grocery store when the call came in. I dropped my bags, and ran towards my apartment. The sensible flats were now a pair of clean tennis shoes, clinical in nature. They carried me to my car, then guided me into the same caravan. The house was small, and totaled cars dotted the property. Eyes of stray cats poked in windows, peered through bushes. They hissed in unison with its voice. “Don’t turn around.” Its voice struck fear into me just as it did the first day I had met it. The corner stepped out of his red jeep. “This call is bad, I’m not gonna lie. It’s going to make you decide just how you fit into the funeral world. If you do at all.”
Me and my coworkers followed along his path. There was no front door, just a crushed moth-eaten curtain nailed to the side. There were no lights in the home, and despite the midday hour, light did not reach the inside of the house. Newspaper covered the windows, painters tape forming the grid around it. The path to the descendants room was that of a tightrope, boxes lined it. A wall enveloped us, made of boxes, clothes, years of trash.
The house smelled. The death no longer had the hallmark scent of overly fresh strawberries I was accustomed to. It smelled like the piece of old bacon you find in the package buried under the cheese. The floor crunched with flies, rot so far gone even the files forgot to buzz. He laid on a pile of clothes. I could not describe his blood, his skin, his eyes, or his hair even if I wanted to. Everything was black. It perfectly resembled the space between the sockets that enveloped its green eyes. The descendants’ eyes were so far sunken that even the skull gave way.
When people die and are left for several months in the hot summer desert they…mummify. His arms were tight leather wrapped around the boney sticks. All of his clothes had been torn off. Except for his cowboy boots.
I gasped, but not in reaction to the dead. It was there, in the corner. It was, infront, of me. I at first did not comprehend this. I thought to myself, “I can turn around.”
Normally such a thought would elicit an act of violence. Slamming me into whatever surface lay in front of me. But it did not acknowledge me. Its hands were not felt anywhere on my body. A bead of sweat formed on my brow. The first time my body had accurately responded to this summer’s blazing heat. I turned, only the blinking sun from the doorway faced me. We went to bag the deceased man, to wrap him in the white bag, and let the intern seal the orange tag.
As I went to zip his bag, I saw the creatures white boney hand reach for his. It was a delicate action, parental and nurturing in nature. The white of my monster’s hand glinted against the black of his pitch-black radial bone. It then brushed his forehead, the way a parent would care for a sick child. It looked back towards me. It seemed indifferent, no malice, cold, or anger. It disappeared.
The call finished smoothly. The deceased rested in our fridge until 3 am the following day - the designated time the state mortuary program collected the forgotten. They removed him from our fridges, placed him in the top shelf of their refrigerated semi. It stood in the corner. Its height made him hunch his assumed shoulders. Its horns cast shadows along the walls. It dripped red blood onto the semis white floor. I heard the whisper form in my head, “Dont turn -“
“I won’t,” I said, interrupting the creature. It didn’t finish. The door of the semi clunked shut. It was sealed in there. I vaguely remember thinking of Mahaf, the Egyptian ferryman who carried the souls of the dead. I wondered if this creature was that ancient, if he had been following and carrying for the forgotten since the beginning. I wondered how many of the living had he accompanied, and haunted. I wondered how many had survived.