Flesh

DEDICATION

For Sullivan McPig and his owner, Carien, who journey far and wide.

And for my husband, Jason, who groks all the gross stuff.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Novels by Laura Bickle

CHAPTER ONE

The dead are easy to talk to.

Live people, not so much.

But I try anyway. My face hurts from smiling, my lips pulling back from my teeth. My lip gloss smells like cherries, but I can’t taste it. I’m sweating underneath my peasant blouse, and I tug at the neckline to keep my bra straps from showing as I stand up on the still-moving school bus.

Hauling my backpack over my shoulder, I move toward the door before the bus grinds to a stop in front of my house. I avoid stepping on lanky legs stretched out across the floorboards, loose shoelaces, and sliding piles of books. I try to keep my balance on a pair of metallic platform sandals that looked much cuter in the catalog than they do in reality. My heart’s pounding. I tell myself that it’s just a small, random panic attack, the kind I get several times a day when I think people are looking at me. I tell myself that I’m not going to die.

It’s just the anxiety. Just the anxiety...

Hey, Charlie. Fingers grab the tail of my shirt. My neckline dips dangerously low, and I automatically draw my hand up to cover myself.

I look down, and Kaitlyn is looking up at me through a fringe of straight bangs. She was prom queen last year. And the year before that. She’s only spoken to me a handful of times.

Hey, I croak back.

Are you gonna have a Halloween party at your house again?

The bus lurches to a stop, and I sway on my platforms. Um...

Jesus. Halloween is still weeks away, and I was hoping to avoid this question for a while longer. Then I could come up with something brilliant to say that I could rehearse and blurt out automatically.

"Last year was legendary," Kaitlyn says.

I know. It was the key to my social acceptance at school. For five glorious minutes, I was Queen of the Dead. But it also got me into huge trouble with my parents. Huge trouble. I got put on lockdown like a prison flight risk. Suddenly, I wasn’t fun anymore.

I, uh, dunno yet.

Kaitlyn’s eyes narrow. When will you know?

I glance around. The popular kids in the middle of the bus and the emos in the back have stopped talking to stare at me. A flush creeps up my neck. A couple of girls in track suits grin hopefully at me. I want that approval from them. From all the girls that manage to have flawlessly flat-ironed hair and perfect GPAs, really.

Ghoul Girl, someone mutters.

It’s my unfortunate nickname, and my gaze slides to the clot of kids dressed in black at the back of the bus. They’re watching me, too. A boy with black hair glances up at me as he ties his boots. He’d be cute—if he weren’t wearing more makeup than I am.

The door of the bus folds back before me. Escape.

Soon, I squeak.

Let me know. Kaitlyn looks down at her cell phone.

I’ve been dismissed, and I flee.

I scurry down the bus steps and trip on the last one. I catch myself before I go sprawling on the ground, but pain still lances up my ankle. Laughter trickles through the open windows. I hope to God that nobody saw that and that they’re not laughing at me, but I know they probably are. I square my shoulders and start down the drive without looking back, heading home.

Home to Sulliven’s Funeral Home. That’s what the sign says at the corner of the driveway. The other kids think it’s weird. Weirder than the farm that we pass on the bus that always smells thickly of manure. The kid who lives there gets the same odd looks and comments, but not as many as I do. It makes me wonder if our place stinks, too.

A long gravel driveway curves up to our house, which is sort of in the middle of nowhere. There’s plenty of parking in the adjacent field, and no close neighbors to smell anything funky. The ass-end of the hearse is parked next to the house. A bucket stands beside it. The car is always freshly waxed.

The old-looking house at the end of the drive is exactly that—old. It dates back from the nineteenth century, a two-story house with wood shingles painted white and black shutters. There’s a huge wraparound porch with columns, urns, and hanging baskets holding flowers. The flowers are changed out every few weeks to look fresh, and right now they’re chrysanthemums. There are electric candles in every window facing the road, and they’re always plugged in. The front door has been painted red so many times over the years that it’s as thick and bright as lacquer.

I unlock the front door and push my way inside. Unlike most people in this rural area, we always lock our doors. The rest of my family uses the back door, where the stuff that’s not socially acceptable lurks. The front door, however, is nice and ordinary and intended for the public. It makes me feel normal to use it.

I smell roses the second I step inside—roses and floor wax. It’s actually a spray that florists use on real roses to make them smell more fragrant. We use a lot of it. A bouquet of pink roses stands in a crystal vase on a credenza in the entryway. I dump my backpack beside it and frown when I peer into the mirror perched over it. The mirror is surrounded by framed black-and-white photographs of previous generations of Sullivens who ran the funeral home. They are all dark-haired, dressed in black, wearing solemn expressions, and holding flowers.

I look nothing like them. My hair is long, straight, and very blonde. It’s naturally brown and wavy, but I bleach it out as pale as I can get it. It takes two boxes of drugstore bleach and a whole weekend afternoon once a month to get it the color of butter like the girls in the magazines. Those girls have it together. They’re normal. My fingers creep up to my roots. They’re dark, and they’re showing. Dark as the color of my eyes, which I can do absolutely nothing about. Not until I can save up to get some colored contacts or something. I really want blue-green ones that I saw in a catalog, the color of sea glass. I’ve applied for a few jobs in town, but it’s hard to get someone to hire me, since I don’t have my driver’s license yet. Until then, I guess my eyes will be muddy, and my roots will probably be showing.

Charlotte!

I wince a little when I hear my name called. I’ve been trying to train my family to call me Charlie since I was in fourth grade. They forget sometimes, though, especially my mother. Charlotte sounds like a gothic heroine, which is not what I am or what I want to be.

Yeah? I call back.

Grab the dog!

The sound of claws skittering on the hardwood floors and the jingle of a collar approaches from the back hallway. A blur of brown fur gallops toward me. I reach down to try and snag the collar, but I wobble on my sandals.

The dog thunders past me, to the front door. He’s a cinnamon-colored dachshund, but he sounds like an elephant. He has something in his mouth. Jesus, it looks like something with fingers. A human arm.

Lothar! I shriek. Bad dog!

His claws hit the door, and it swings open. His ass is out the door and outside before I can snatch the handle.

I swear, tearing the sandals off my feet, and rush out the door after the dog. He’s past the driveway and halfway across the yard already, running for all he’s worth.

So, about Lothar. We’ve had him for about five years. His original owner, Mr. Kaiser, died and we took care of the arrangements. Mr. Kaiser was our mailman, and nobody stepped forward to take care of his dog. Lothar is apparently a proper German name for a dachshund. It means something like renowned warrior. We call him Lothar the Man-Eater for entirely accurate, if unsavory reasons.

Lothar runs across the field by my dad’s dormant tomato garden. He drops his prize and digs with all his might, dirt flying. Dachshunds are diggers, and he’s no exception. I charge toward him, my toes curling against the cold, squishy ground.

I reach down and snatch up the arm, relieved to find that it’s a hard plastic prosthesis.

This time.

I shake the limb at him. Bad Lothar!

The dog turns, half-buried in his hole. He stares up at me with big brown eyes and whines. Then he sneers up at me unrepentantly and barks. Mr. Kaiser reportedly trained Lothar with sausages. Lothar seems to think sausage tastes a lot like human. I will trust his judgment, but there is no untraining his desire to make off with bits of the dead. He’s a dog. How do you tell a dog that it’s really rude to make off with fingers, socks...and in one case, a glass eyeball? He’s taught himself to climb step stools to get into coffins. He’s a standard thirty-pound dachshund and very determined. He snatched Mrs. Essex’s wig away right before her viewing. I found him burying it in the flower bed and had to rinse it out in the kitchen sink and get it back on Mrs. Essex’s head before her children arrived.

But the eyeball... Heh. We never found it. But Lothar stopped eating a day later, so we took him to the vet. They took X-rays and found a round, glass object blocking his intestinal tract. We couldn’t leave it there to work its way out, though. It could break, and he could bleed to death. So Lothar got unzipped and had the eyeball taken out. It’s now sitting in the bottom of a vase in the parlor with a bunch of other marbles. Funeral home humor. No guest has ever noticed that it’s there.

I sling the prosthetic arm over my shoulder and pick up Lothar. He squirms and rubs his muddy paws all over my blouse. I snuggle him anyway as I trek back through the field. Mincing over the sharp gravel driveway, I carry him back to the house.

My dad’s standing on the porch, arms crossed over his chest. He’s a tall, bald man. When he’s working around the public, he wears a suit, like all funeral directors do. He’s got a closet full of suits in charcoal gray and black with subdued blue ties to match. But since we have no funerals today, he’s dressed for other work: an apron with dark, viscous smudges on it.

Oh, good, you found it!

As I climb the porch, he plucks the extraneous arm from my shoulder and kisses me on top of the head.

Hi, Dad. Where do you want him? I gesture with my chin to the still-squirming Lothar.

Ugh. He’s filthy. Take him to the back, and we’ll give him a bath. Don’t let his muddy feet touch the floor.

Right.

Lothar wriggles back and forth like a snake, but I hold him tight and carry him down the polished hallway. My dad opens the door to the back of the house, where most of the work the public doesn’t see takes place. Under the original floor plan, this area used to be the kitchen. Now, it’s what we call the Body Shop, where fluorescent light burns twenty-four hours a day.

I have been told it smells funny back here. I wouldn’t know. I don’t smell it. Except for that one time when I went away on a class trip to Washington, DC for a week and came back. Then, I think I could smell it. It’s an artificial scent, kind of like pizza sausage preservative. We don’t use formaldehyde anymore in the industry, but the chemicals we do use have a sharpness to them that tends to mask the soft scent of decay. My dad opens the windows when he can during the warmer months. When he can’t, there’s a fume hood that can be turned on, but it’s noisy as hell.

The floor is a glossy green industrial tile, and drains pierce the floor in three areas. The glass in the windows is textured so that no one can see in. I lift the dog up to a stainless steel table in the middle of the floor. It has high sides and slopes slightly, so that water runs toward a drain in the bottom. There’s a hose that looks a lot like an extra-long vegetable sprayer looped over the faucets.

Lothar grumbles when I place him on the cold surface and my dad sets the prosthetic arm on a counter and holds on to Lothar’s collar. I turn on the faucets, testing the water temperature. Waiting for the hot water to kick on, I grab a bottle of shampoo from under the sink. It’s got a light floral scent. We buy it by the gallon from one of those warehouse stores. This is the stuff we use to wash hair on the Dearly Departed, but it also works on dogs.

I aim the sprayer over Lothar, and my dad begins to lather him up.

Whose arm was that? I ask.

My dad groans. Mr. Curtis. He’s in makeup, now. He’s got a three-thirty day the after tomorrow.

Is that the guy with the bullets in him? The vast majority of the people we receive at the Body Shop are old. Old people who, judging from the photo collages made by their relatives, lived full lives and who had popped over as a result of old age.

Yeah. We have no idea where those came from. He had two bullets in his abdomen. Scarred over, your mom said. Like, decades old.

So he didn’t die from that? The funny thing about this industry is that you find out all kinds of things about people, including their secrets. The vast majority of them are things you don’t tell the family, but bullets in the gut seems like something they’d know.

Not then and not now. He had pneumonia and essentially drowned in his own snot. Nobody has a clue about the bullets.

Ah.

My dad soaps the whining dog’s ears up. Droplets of water speckle his glasses.

How was school? he asks.

Okay. I got an A on my Geometry test, I say.

Good girl. He beams at me. My dad would still be posting my report cards on the refrigerator, if I’d let him.

I rinse down Lothar and he gives in to a mighty shake. He spatters water all over, raining down on the steel and tile with a ringing sound. My dad snatches a towel to cover the dog and towel him off. Lothar gives me an impish look as the muddy, sudsy water sluices down the drain.

Should we let him air-dry or blow-dry him? I ask.

Eh. He should be fine to air-dry, my dad says. But you can zap him with the hairdryer if you want.

I wrinkle my nose. I may not be able to smell the preservatives in plastic jars along the wall anymore, but I can smell wet dog. I think I will.

Your grandmother has it still, I think. In the Green Room.

Okay.

I pick up Lothar, holding him at arm’s length from my now-muddy shirt and place him on the tile floor. His claws click and echo in the space.

Go find Gramma, Lothar, I say.

Lothar struts across the floor and noses through a pair of swinging double doors. All the easier to roll carts and caskets through.

The next room is what we call the Green Room. Ater the Dearly Departed are examined, washed, and embalmed in the Body Shop, they come here. The Green Room is where they’re dressed, made up, have their hair styled, and are ultimately placed into their coffins. Then they go into the parlor until Showtime.

Gramma is perched on a stool, hunched over an old dead man who doesn’t have an arm. Her hair went white a long time ago, but she dyes it with a bit of blond, so it’s platinum. It’s pinned up with a hair clip, and she peers through her bifocals, pursing her lips. In her perfectly-manicured fingers, she’s holding a brush, dabbing makeup over the old man’s face. Gramma used to do makeup for the theater, and now she’s the most prolific Avon saleslady in three counties. When I was a kid, she let me play with her pink makeup kit. I always thought she was the most glamorous woman in the world. I still do, even though the top of a heart-surgery scar peeks over the neckline of her smock.

Mr. Curtis, I presume? I ask.

Gramma smiles at me over the rims of her glasses. In the flesh. Do you think he’s more of a summer or a winter?

I peer over her shoulder at the stiff. He’s been dressed in a suit, and Gramma has covered his neck with a lobster bib. Gramma does great work. You can’t even see where his eyes and lips have been sewn shut. She somehow manages to add the breath of life to him with the cream blushes she’s blending on the back of her hand. Not Avon, though. Special stuff for the dead. But the colors are still pretty.

I think he’s a winter, I reply.

Gramma chortles. I think so, too.

What’s so funny?

"I think he thought he was a spring."

What do you mean?

Go look at his toes.

I go to the foot of the table. Mr. Curtis is wearing shiny black shoes with the laces tied in neat bows. I untie the laces and slip the right shoe and sock off.

And I immediately double over in giggles.

See? Gramma murmurs. Spring.

Mr. Curtis’s toes are immaculately-groomed and filed, painted a pale salmon color with a pearly sheen. It’s really lovely.

Nice work, Gramma.

The funeral home business is prone to odd jokes. Very odd jokes.

Gramma presses a hand to her pink smock in feigned shock. It wasn’t me! He came in that way. Your father washed him and noticed them then.

You gonna leave ’em that way?

Yes. I could take it off, but— she shrugs, and the beaded chain on her glasses rattles —his family won’t see it. And he deserves to go to the afterlife the way he went out, the way he wanted to be.

I nod. We won’t tell anyone. Keeping secrets is part and parcel of the funeral business. It’s been ingrained in me since I was a child. With my mom as coroner and my dad as a funeral director, the house is both morgue and mortuary. It’s an odd arrangement, to be sure, but it’s a product of an old era and lack of local funding to build a proper morgue in the county seat. We are practitioners, in many ways, of some very sacred rites. We keep the secrets of the dead, whether they involve Mr. Curtis’s pink toenails or the frilly underwear worn by a local (male) politician. One teenage boy involved in a drunk driving accident had a pocketful of condoms that we discreetly made disappear. There was also a woman who had pulled out most of her hair, so we covered that with a hairpiece. And we put a woman who had been cutting herself for years in a long-sleeved dress. We owe it to the Dearly Departed to give them some sense of dignity, not to spread them out naked for the world’s judgment. Once the doctors and police have done their job, it is our work to make things respectable, to put everything that’s been torn apart by their scrutiny back together. We may crack wiseass jokes behind closed doors, but when it’s Showtime, it’s all about the somber respect.

Gramma leans back. There. She pats Mr. Curtis’s serene and glowing face. He looks as though he’s fallen asleep in the sunshine. If I have time after dinner, I’ll paint your toes a proper shade of crocus pink for your send-off, she tells him.

My stomach involuntarily growls, and I grasp the front of my muddy top. What’s for dinner?

Spaghetti and meatballs.

Oh, yum.

Most people think it’s weird to think about food around the dead. But...we’re used to it. People are just flesh, whether they’re dead or alive. That doesn’t diminish our respect for them, but life is for the living.

I reach down to remove Mr. Curtis’s sock from Lothar’s mouth. Lothar seems clearer on this concept than most people, which is why we love him. I redress Mr. Curtis’s foot as Gramma packs up her makeup kit and wanders out of the room.

It’s just me, the dog, and the Dearly Departed now. After blow-drying Lothar for about thirty seconds—when he drifts out of reach of the hairdryer cord—I sit on Gramma’s stool next to Mr. Curtis. When I was a little girl, I used to talk to the Dearly Departed. It was sort of like having a continually-changing set of imaginary friends. I would daydream about what their lives had been like, painting elaborate stories of who they were and where they’d been. The never answered me, of course. My mom would always do a sweep of coffins before Showtime to make sure I didn’t leave any toys in the casket after an incident when I left a stuffed dog in Mrs. Spears’s coffin and it was buried with her. I cried for days, but my mom told me that the dog was with Mrs. Spears in heaven.

It sounds pretty weird that I talked to corpses, but not so much when I think about the fact that I didn’t have many friends when I was small. Kids were always too afraid to come to our house. There was our neighbor, Renee, but she’s no longer speaking to me. But sometime in the last couple of years, what my folks did for a living became interesting, at least around Halloween. Not sure when that happened, but I wanted to be treated normally, not like the Ghoul Girl. Even if I didn’t always act like it behind closed doors.

Mr. Curtis, I say to the rosy corpse, your loved ones will be here soon to say goodbye. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I hope it is good and wonderful for you.

I reach out to touch his hand. It’s cold, like meat left out on the counter for too long. I don’t know what his vision of heaven was, but I hope there is plenty of pink nail polish and that he