The post-funerary arrangements advisor, which was his appointed title, kept sniffing while he spoke. Not in the middle of speaking, but between sentences. It was either a tic or he was ill. “It’s a simple procedure, so I don’t think you should worry,” he told me. I had not said I was worried, nor did I think I had given any signs. Of course I was worried, but I wasn’t about to go and tell him. It didn’t seem like the type of thing people were worried about anymore. Sure they had been worried five years ago, but just about everyone was used to it now. I couldn’t go around all worried if I wanted to be taken seriously.
“I’m quite sure,” I responded. The man did not reply or look at me. Clearly he was skeptical. “I mean, my friends have gone through this sort of thing before. My sister has. I understand it’s all perfectly natural.”
“It is,” he agreed, lowering his brows. He was upset with me, as if my observation that it was natural addressed a train of thought that it wasn’t natural, and he didn’t want that business in the same room. “It is perfectly natural. Now, all I need to know is if you’re prepared to fulfill your grandfather’s wishes.”
These aren’t his wishes, I thought, though I didn’t say anything. I smiled at him stupidly.
“Of course,” I said. “I do think I’m the best person for it. I’m afraid he doesn’t really talk to anyone other than my sister and I.”
The man smiled. “I doubt he does much talking at all nowadays, huh?” He said. We laughed lightly, though I felt sick to my stomach. That was another thing I hadn’t gotten used to. The glibness. Nothing held the weight it used to— There was no reason for it to, of course, but I was still in my period of adjustment.
“Yes, well,” I said. “I understand everything is in order. I understand the process. I know that, at this point, it’s only a matter of waiting. What is it you need me for?”
“That’s just it,” the man said. He stood up from his desk, buttoning his jacket as he came to his feet. He walked over to his bookshelf, one that I noticed had several nondescript books irrelevant to the funerary practice, and picked out a thick binder with laminated pages. “As we said, your grandfather isn’t doing much talking these days. If you weren’t involved, we’d make the decision for ourselves. However, you make it a bit complicated.”
I blushed. “I’m sorry.”
He glanced at me, then sat back down. He opened the binder and spread his long, thin fingers over the glossy pages. I sat forward, fingers laced and squeezed between my legs. It was the posture of a child, but it felt natural in a chair that low. The pages were photographs of different models. Some were men, some women, some skinny, some tall, some heavy, some short. They were all involved in different poses.
“So, of course you can come up with a pose yourself,” he said. I examined the poses he showed me. One was a man with his hands on his hips, grinning. I had seen that one before on the street. I passed by a guy, and I only realized what he was a few seconds after passing. I broke out into a sweat and forced myself to keep walking. “But if you’re stumped, these are our free options.”
I looked up at him. “What, uh,” I started. “What if I happen to come up with a pose that’s in here that I haven’t seen? One that you charge for, I mean.”
“That’d be quite a coincidence,” the man said. He closed the book. “I doubt that will happen. If it does, I’ve already met with you, and I know what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. Don’t worry too much.”
A lot of people had been saying that lately. “I’ll come up with something,” I said. “You’ll need it in a few days, you said?”
“A few days,” He nodded. “Unless a miracle happens and your grandfather lives. Then we’d be in trouble wouldn’t we?”
I heard myself laugh and came to my feet. When we shook hands, his palm was dry, almost flaky. Instinctively, I thought about how something like that would be preserved. The bile rose in my throat.
—
My sister’s terrible roommate answered the door when I rang. Her name was Theresa, and she was already on her phone while opening the door. She cast me a cursory glance and her nose wrinkled.
“Oh,” she said, disgust seeping into her voice. “She’s in the bathroom.”
She turned around and started walking down the hall to her bedroom.
“Oh, okay!” I said. “Is it alright if I wait in the living room, then?”
Theresa stopped, scoffed, and looked over her shoulder. “She’s doing her hair,” she clarified, her tone implying that I was an idiot for even inferring anything otherwise. “Do what you want.”
I waited for the door to close behind her before I came in and headed toward the bathroom. It shocked me that my sister and Theresa hadn’t killed each other yet. It’s not that they were so very different— They were both powerful, cold women, and I’ve found that those personalities can often clash, but these two had been able to stay out of each other’s way thus far.
My sister was in the middle of bleaching her roots, which she did monthly. The longer her hair got, the more annoying the process was. She had a chunk of long, icy hair clipped to her crown, falling down over her face. While she looked in the long ballet mirrors that came with the bathroom, a hand mirror was clumsily taped on the wall behind her. At first, she didn’t notice me, as he sight was obscured and any sound of my shoes was muffled by her blasting Helmet. Eventually, using her forearm to swipe some hair out of her eyes, she noticed me in her peripherals. She cursed and brought her elbow to her phone, bumping it to the screen until she was able to hit pause.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming over!” She said.
“I won’t be here long.”
“It’s fine,” she said. She took off her gloves. “How did the meeting go?”
“It was okay,” I said. I looked at the dust collected on the base of the toilet. “Say, what’s the fine if we bury Granddad?”
“$200,000,” she replied. “Plus prison time if we show prior intent.”
“What the hell would constitute prior intent? Buying a shovel?” She shrugged. I sighed, walked in, and sat on the closed toilet. “I’m sorry. I know I should be used to it by now. I mean, you went through all this when Laura died.”
“I did,” she said. “I didn’t want to. Neither did she. She said if there was any justice in the world, I could just turn her into a pile of ashes and throw her in a lake. A nice one, though. One of those icy cold ones. But, y’know, by then it wasn’t a choice. Sometimes I think about all those poor people who aren’t like Laura or Granddad, the ones who don’t have people close to them. The ones that just get put out on the street in those stupid superhero poses. I bumped into one giving me a thumbs up the other day. They gave her veneers.”
I nodded solemnly. “That’s what the meeting was about,” I said. “Everything was in order, but they want to know what pose I want to put Granddad in. I don’t want him to end up with one of those superhero poses. He rarely smiled when he was alive. What keeps getting me is, like…How do you preserve someone as they were throughout their whole life in one still image? How can a life be that succinct?”
“Theresa once said it’s like portraiture,” she said. She apparently decided that our conversation was no longer formal enough to warrant her full attention, so she was putting on new gloves and mixing more bleach. “It’s not always accurate, but it’s imbuing an image of how a person wants to be remembered. That’s why portraits were so important before photographs, and that’s why this is so important now.”
“That’s really smart,” I admitted. That was another frightening thing about Theresa. A mean, dumb person was one thing, but a person who was mean and intelligent always terrified me. “Okay, so I have to think of an all-encompassing image of Granddad that feels true to his character and encompasses his whole life. Cool.”
“Do the Ulysses S. Grant photo,” she said. I stared at her. She raised an eyebrow. “The one in his study?”
“Oh!” I said, suddenly remembering. Our whole lives, he had a photograph of Grant above his desk in his study. He never kept any photos of us or his late wife, but he would always look up from his work and stare at that photograph. It showed Grant standing next to a chair, one hand fixed to his lapel, the other in his pocket. The way men used to pose in old photographs. Granddad liked Grant a lot— he always said he wasn’t terribly well-versed in Civil War history, as something like World War I was more within his wheelhouse, but he liked how Grant was a serious man. That was the only justification he felt necessary to give. He was a serious man.
“Yeah.” My sister said, looking back at her reflection.
“God, he’d love that,” I said, sweeping a hand through my hair. “I mean, he wouldn’t love it, but you know what I mean. It’d be making the best of…” I trailed off. She got what I meant.
“Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind,” she said, brushing globs of bleach onto the nape of her neck. “Sometimes the obvious answer doesn’t hit us right away. Laura’s in a sitting pose, which cost a bit extra, but I don’t care. I had no idea what to do at first. Part of me just wanted to say ‘screw it’ and put her in a lunging, screaming pose, like a vampire. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then, I was going through the secondhand store, and I found a print of that Parmigianino painting.” I blinked. “Madonna with the Long Neck. It’s a gorgeous painting. I think it’s— I think it was Laura’s favorite. Nothing about the whole thing made sense, but that was the most sense I could find within it. I asked her, she didn’t hear me, and I went ahead with it.”
I looked down at my shoes. It was hard to hear her talk about Laura. I wanted to get vulnerable, tell her how sorry I was, tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t be as much support as I would have liked during that time. I didn’t have an excuse, I just didn’t know how to address a thing like that. I hadn’t experienced that level of loss at such a conscious point in my life, and especially not in this new way that loss presented itself. They said it wasn’t permanent anymore, that it was a physical reminder, that it was a comfort bringer. They said you could hold your loved ones whenever you wanted. They said it was just like the real thing. If I thought about it too long, I sent myself into a panic. I didn’t go to her unveiling. Whenever I got up, I had to sit back down, put my head between my knees, and press my kneecaps into my temples like I was trying to pinch a grape. I’d think of Laura, I’d think of the people who died out on the streets, I’d think of everyone who was so close and dear to me who I’d have to decide for later. It was hard to eat in those early days. It was hard to do anything.
“Yeah, well,” I said, standing up. “That’s the best thing you can do, right?”
“Yes,” my sister said firmly, like she had made peace with it. She paused, then turned to me, lifting the chunk of hair from her face and letting it fall down against her back. “Look, I should tell you this now, because they didn’t warn me with Laura. I mean, we’ve all seen what they look like, but it’s different. He is going to look wrong. He isn’t going to look like Granddad. As much as they can replicate his face, or his frame, or whatever, it isn’t going to be him. There is going to be something taken out of him, something so invisible but so large, and it’s going to tear you apart. It’s going to make your blood run cold. However scared you get running into those strangers you didn’t know and you never will know, it’s going to be worse, and you need to be ready, because they made me feel like a fool for being horrified. He is not going to be himself. Do you understand?”
Everyone kept asking me that. “Yes,” I lied. “I’ll prepare myself.”
“Good,” she said. She turned back to her reflection. “You can let yourself out. Please call me when the date is chosen. Please give Granddad my love. I love you.”
We never hugged. “I love you too,” I said, stepping past her and smiling. I closed the door behind me, breathed and walked down the hall. When I passed the closet, the hair on my arms stood up and my feet turned to lead. I had never looked before. Like many things, it was too hard. However, I had known Laura. I knew what she was supposed to look like. I needed to prepare myself. My hand closed over the closet door, and I turned.
Laura’s taxidermied body sat in the closet. She was in a chair, like my sister said, one hand draped over her leg, the other gently touching her sternum. Her head was tilted down, eyes slightly closed, gently smiling. I brought a hand to my mouth, feeling the vomit rise. I swung the door shut, but the image stayed implanted on my eyelids. She looked fine, really. So much more comfortable than those other people they propped up in the street to remind you that death wasn’t so scary, they’ll always be with us, look how happy they are. No one is allowed to get buried anymore. She looked fine, but it was all wrong. She wasn’t the woman that she was. She’d never get to be a person anymore.
—
“I like to warn people, but I don’t find it so morbid anymore,” the animal taxidermist told me. She was in late middle age, some streaks of grey in her cropped hair, wearing big, thick glasses that magnified her brown eyes. The taxidermy of her late husband was set up in the studio, one arm slinging a jacket over his shoulder, the other arm holding his hand out. She took off her necklace and hung it over his wrist. “Everything’s preserved, and you won’t be seeing any blood. Of course, I get why people are squeamish. I’m not so glib about all that stuff. Her name was Santa.”
I snapped to attention. My fingers were curled over the stool I was sitting on. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s an Italian name, I think. She was an Italian Greyhound. You ready to see how it’s done?” She grinned at me, blinking through her giant glasses. I nodded and pulled my stool forward. She placed a mass of hard foam and dried clay on the table. Then, she gently put down what looked like an animal skin blanket with a fabric lining. I looked closer and saw a paw. I looked away.
“It’s a simple process,” she explained, moving the foam mound around. People always said that, as if what confused and upset me was the simplicity. “Have you seen it done before? Well, it’s simple. As a kid, I didn’t really realize how it was done— It thought it was a preservation thing, like a kind of permanent embalming. There is a level of preservation to it, but only for the skin and fur and such. Folks also get confused about what goes into these things. ‘Stuffing’ as a term is so misleading, you know. It’s not so much about stuffing as it is about covering. Folks way back when, even as I was learning, used to carve wood into shapes and then cover, pin, and adhere the hides. Nowadays, urethane foam and clay and such is a lot more forgiving and a lot more common. Only issue is that sometimes people like to throw these things around like baseballs because they’re so light. Understanding so far?”
I nodded. I was beginning to see a shape in the mound. Thighs, a round back, skinny legs with elbows pushed back, a thin head lowered in modest regality. She was alive once. My eyes flittered over to the husband next to the wall. His still face was in the middle of rolling its eyes. The permanence of being put-upon.
She noticed me looking and smiled. “He used to get so sick of me going on and on,” she said. “Now he doesn’t have any choice but to listen. Hear that, Hank? You’re stuck with me until I’m next to you!” She shook her head. “It makes people uncomfortable, you know? The way I talk to him. The way I bounce my thoughts off him. He told me before he went, he said that I ought to make the best of things. Make him look goofy, ‘cos that’s who he was.”
“Did you taxidermy him?” I asked. I didn’t know if that was the correct verbiage as soon as I said it.
“I did,” she said. “No way I’d be allowed to today, but I was able to back then. I’m very lucky.”
She grabbed the animal hide and turned it fully inside out. The lining had several markings, noting where the specific parts needed to go. With her free hand, she lifted the foam and tilted towards the hide. She rolled the hide over the foam, placing it and shaping it around the different mounds. All at once, the thing turned into an animal. An animal with loose skin and no eyes, but an animal nonetheless. She tightened the face over the facial mound, straightening the ears and the nose.
“Could you hand me the tub on the floor, hon?” She asked. I didn’t realize she was talking to me at first. She lifted her head to look me in the eye. I jumped and grabbed one of the small plastic tubs under the table. She lifted the lid from the tub and rummaged around with her hand. She pulled out what looked like a large brown bead. It was a false eye. She pulled out another, scrutinized the size, shook her head, and pulled out a correct one. She stuck the eyes in place and began to pin certain points of the body.
“I’m still going to have to adhere her, mind you,” she clarified. I said nothing and studied the body. She was becoming a dog again. She wasn’t alive, but she was here.
—
The post-funerary arrangements advisor examined the photograph I handed him. He frowned. He obviously didn’t care for it. I wanted to say that it wasn’t his dead body, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Right,” he said. He looked at me. “Don’t you want him smiling?”
“No!” I said. “No, I want him just like the photo. He loved that photo.”
“People will like it a lot more if he’s smiling.”
“Well, it’s not for people, it’s for me.”
“And your family,” he muttered. “But, fine. Okay. It’s your choice.” He tossed the photograph on his desk and sat down. “You know, you squeezed through just in time. A lot of places are starting to enforce binder-only poses.”
I flexed my hands. “How do you mean?”
He shrugged. “In time, you won’t be allowed to come in with your own poses anymore,” he explained. “You can only choose from the binder.”
I thought back to the binder. The catalog poses, the superhero arms, the smiles. I started getting a stomachache.
“I’ll call you when he’s passed,” I said. From a young age, I had never liked to say “die” or “died.” It was always “passed.” He nodded absently.
“Please do,” he said. He held the photograph up and waved it. “We’ll keep this on file.” I nodded and walked out. The lights flickered subtly in the hallway, the way one might not have noticed if they couldn’t hear the humming and the static. Walking out of the building, I braced against the cold, not having swapped out my autumn jacket for my winter one yet. Instead of heading for my car, I went in the opposite direction. The hospital was only a few blocks away, which I knew was more for structural convenience than thematic. The woman who checked me in at the front desk was chewing gum, which I wasn’t sure was allowed for nurses. I couldn’t think of why it wouldn’t be, but a lot of places didn’t allow it. She offered to walk me to my granddad’s room, but I said no, I could find it just fine. I couldn’t, of course, as the hospital was labyrinthine and every hallway looked the same, but after a half an hour I stumbled upon his room.
The curtain was open slightly, allowing the sunlight of the early evening to stream in and blanch the arm that draped over his stomach. His head was nestled comfortably in the middle of the pillow, mouth closed, eyelids fluttering slightly in the depths of a restless sleep. His beard was growing to his collarbones like a Rip Van Winkle in progress. I walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat down next to him. His breath rattled in his chest, coming in through his nose and getting stuck in the dry gears. I closed my hand around his. It was so warm, almost hot, the blood just at the precipice of his thin skin. As a kid, I used to press my fingers into the prominent veins on the back of his hand. I did the same now. They slid underneath my thumb.
A nurse stepped in at one point and looked at us.
“Do you want the TV on?” She asked. I shook my head. She lingered in the doorway, looking over my granddad. His face was sallow. “Not much longer then, huh?”
“I doubt it,” I said firmly. “The arrangements are in order.”
“You’re keeping him, then?” She asked. I nodded. “That’s good. The last person in this room, you know, she didn’t have anybody. They were going to throw her into that line of folks leading up to the hospital, but I asked to take her in. She looked a lot like my mom.”
“I bet she did,” I replied.
The nurse nodded solemnly. She looked down at her clipboard, pretending to read. The stream of sun hit the edge of her shoe. “So now I have her and my mom,” she explained. I said nothing. My granddad’s monitor could have been slowing, but it was happening so gradually that neither of us could say for sure. The lamp in the room was growing brighter minute by minute. “It’s so strange to have both of them there.”