Stephanie Howard
Fiction Winner
Not bothering to screw on the lid, Anthony Sendall dropped the empty canister that had been sitting next to his pliers into the wastebasket. He’d need to place another order soon, as the recent uptick in deaths brought on by the slow onslaught of winter was slowly eating through his stock of foundation. The jar found a home among the used nitrile gloves and discarded sponges that had gone past their prime. No one wanted to look cakey, even in death.
The wastebasket was rather unassuming considering the variety of hazardous material that left the mortuary. Everyone got to keep their organs unless the medical examiner decided to confiscate them before the body arrived. Sometimes Anthony got to treat them, one by one, injecting them with chemicals and preservatives so the deceased would look perfectly intact and smell fresh by the time of their service. Other times, he needn’t bother, transferring bodies into the cremation chamber and waiting until only fragmented bones remained. He’d take a magnet and go over the ashes, picking up crowns or knee replacements to be disposed of.
It was Halloween, and Josy, Anthony’s assistant who had at some point surpassed her bookkeeping duties into fully managing the business, was adamant that he was not spending tonight in the same building he already spent most of his time in. On the second floor of the funeral home was Anthony’s modest apartment. The living quarters had hardly been touched in the decade since he’d moved in, as he spent most days downstairs in his office or the basement’s mortuary. There was always something to be done, bodies to embalm, services to plan, bills to collect and pay. He’d given up on cooking, instead amassing an impressive collection of takeout boxes on his counter that he’d haul down to the trash can outside when they threatened to take over the small kitchen space. After he got this body prepped, Josy was dragging him over to her house for whatever her idea of fun was while her husband fended off trick-or-treaters.
Mr. Butler, who’d lived down the street from Anthony’s childhood home, had been sanitized already, and Anthony decided after he had set the features, he would call it a day. Josy thought he spent too much time around corpses, and that was nothing compared to how his family felt, though nobody told delivery nurses they spent too much time around babies. He delivered people from the arms of this life into the next, but maybe they all had a point. Anthony couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent an evening with friends, having fun, instead of sitting in his living room watching reruns of Seinfeld and hoping he didn’t hear any noises coming from downstairs.
He still had to massage the body, settle old Mr. Butler on the table, and lay his hands on the frozen joints, coaxing out stiffness until the fingers of death relaxed their grip. The process was vigorous, but done with care. What he had to do in order to set the features was just as careful, but far more intensive, so at least he got to offer a posthumous spa treatment before he had to start manipulating the face.
“Andy? Little Andy Sendall? Is that you? What are you doing to me?” asked a voice from the corner of the room. Anthony ignored it.
Anthony had come to learn that all the gentle lovelinesses that made death bearable often came with brute force. There was no laying of the hand over the eyes. Instead, he’d stretch the eyelids as far as they could go to relieve rigor mortis and insert a plastic cap over the eyeball so the shape would be maintained after decomposition. Mr. Vance, who he’d inherited the home from after a long apprenticeship, had always insisted on gluing the eyes shut, and after some resistance, Anthony eventually found himself doing the same. It was comforting, in a way.
A few years ago, Anthony had done just fine with the caps, no glue necessary. But then, his little town in Florida had been shaken by the untimely death of the d’Orange family’s daughter. Naturally, she’d ended up on his table, but when he began to work on her corpse, she’d talked back. Before the d’Orange girl, Anthony had been skeptical of any other morticians he’d met at conferences who insisted on strange, supernatural occurrences happening within their mortuaries. After the whole matter had been settled, after her untimely death was revealed to be murder and her body finally buried, Anthony thought he’d be free of ghosts. One and done. That was three years ago, and after Anthony had seen his first real ghost, more had plagued him since. None were as chatty or intrusive as Ursula d’Orange had been, but they kept cropping up in the corners of his vision.
There were stories he’d heard in mortuary school, or at the conferences he’d attended for people who worked in the death industry, that he’d never taken seriously. The usual, run-of-the-mill ghost stories, like strange noises and apparitions. Anthony could now put them all to shame. He’d learned early on not to talk to the ghosts. The first one he’d seen after Ursula d’Orange had come in after a car accident, and when he’d responded to the specter having a meltdown watching him put her mangled body in the cremation chamber, she’d gripped his shoulders, hung on him, and begged him to help her, but there was nothing he could do. After that, he’d settled for feigning ignorance, pretending he couldn’t hear them, would look right through their visage as they tried to wave, desperate for anyone to see them. He couldn’t bear to be these people’s only hope, just to let them down when he couldn’t, somehow, bring them back to life.
He’d had too many nightmares where he was down here, in his basement, doing work on someone’s face, when their eyes would snap open and they’d clutch his shoulders just like that first ghost after Ursula, pleading with him. And so, he took a page out of Mr. Vance’s book and began to glue the eyelids shut. Anthony still didn’t sleep well, but at least he knew that particular nightmare would remain just that.
Even before the ghosts and the nightmares, Anthony had always enjoyed setting the jaw and the mouth. It was garish, sure—passing the needle through the maxilla, up the septum, and down through the mandible—but he enjoyed its methodicalness. It reminded him of sitting with his grandmother, watching her sew and practicing on whatever scraps of fabric she tossed his way. His grandmother had a little business where people would drop off their broken, crumbling stuffed animals and cloth dolls at their door, and she would sew them back up again until it looked like nothing bad had ever happened to them.
That was how Anthony felt about his work. People brought him the broken dolls of their loved ones, legs hanging on by a thread, stuffing spilling out, waterlogged and reeking. He got to stitch up the seams, bring people back to life and present them, leaving their families with a final, perfect memory. His work was less cute or palatable than his grandmother’s, but when he remembered the overjoyed, teary smiles on people’s faces when his grandmother handed them back their childhood teddy bear, he could only think about how he wanted to do the same. Every time a family member told him someone he’d worked on looked beautiful, like they were alive again, better than they’d looked in the last months of their life, he got close to how he imagined his grandmother felt, knowing he’d been able to help people in the only way he knew how.
He got to stitch up the seams, bring people back to life and present them, leaving their families with a final, perfect memory.
Anthony pulled back from Mr. Butler’s body below him, snipping the thread as he finished a suture, and ignored the wavering outline of the man watching him work.
“Can you hear me?” Mr. Butler’s ghost asked. “Can you see me? Good God, what’s going on?”
Mr. Butler continued to speak as Anthony set his tools down. All done for the evening. He glanced at the clock, seeing it was just past six. He’d have to get everything cleaned up and get ready before Josy came down there and dragged him out herself.
“I don’t want to walk through the graveyard,” Anthony complained.
“Too bad! We have to!” Josy replied a little too eagerly. “It’s the quickest way to my place. I’m not letting you sit in your sad little apartment tonight. You’re going to hang out with Eugene and me so we can judge the costumes of trick-or-treaters. It’ll be fun!”
Anthony lived right next to the town’s historical graveyard because of course he did. The rows of ancient headstones butted up against the back of the funeral home, and ten acres across from him was the street where Josy lived with her giant skeleton of a husband.
“I walk here and back every day. It won’t kill you. You can Uber back if you really want. Now come on.”
Anthony accepted that he wouldn’t make any more progress and reluctantly followed Josy through the gates. The cemetery was the oldest in New Valencia, Florida, and they’d stopped burying people in it decades ago, even before it was a designated historical site. Low, wrought-iron fencing framed the grounds, where the graves were shaded by massive oak trees draped with Spanish moss and intermittent palms.
As Anthony lingered behind Josy, who strolled ahead without a care in the world, his eyes darted around nervously. By virtue of his profession, Anthony was very familiar with graveyards. He actually quite liked them, their serenity so dignified that the wind hardly dared to blow for risk of causing a disturbance. But ever since the d’Orange girl had been murdered three summers ago, he’d found himself avoiding them. While ghosts usually went about their own business, occasionally, whenever he slipped up, let his eyes meet theirs for a second too long, they’d descend on him, the listless figures blanketing the place coming in droves, always searching for a peace he couldn’t possibly begin to bring them.
Though this cemetery was normally peaceful—many of its residents had long since become at peace and moved on from this world—tonight was different. He’d discovered long ago that the old superstition about Halloween his grandmother would regale him with was true, that the veil separating this life from the afterlife did seem to weaken, allowing visitors to pass through. Anthony turned his gaze up toward the moon, willfully pretending there wasn’t a congregation of ghosts around them. “Oh, great,” came Josy’s voice from a few feet forward.
“What is it?” he asked, looking back ahead of him, picking up speed to catch up with her. Anthony peered over Josy’s shoulder to see what had caught her attention. There, in the center of the path through the cemetery, was the crumpled figure of an elderly woman, dressed more warmly than the weather required, slumped over the mound of a grave. Her face was pressed into the grass at the bottom of the tombstone, which declared the plot as the home of Ulysses Miller, who had died in 1948, a few years before the cemetery had stopped accepting new inhabitants. Josy bent down and felt for the old woman’s pulse. “Well?” Anthony asked.
Josy shook her head. “Nothing,” she sighed, standing back up. “I’ll call Eugene and tell him we’re gonna be late. Can you call 911 to report the body?”
Anthony couldn’t believe that the one time he tried to leave work at home, actually get out and try to experience the world of the living, work still managed to follow him. It felt like a warning. He let out a heavy sigh but had already gotten his phone out and was waiting for an operator. He gave Josy a thumbs-up with a blank expression on his face as she got out her own phone.
Emergency services came and went, picking up the body, which they’d identified as an Elizabeth Miller then asked him and Josy a few questions. They were a little mystified at how unbothered the two seemed at stumbling upon a dead body on Halloween night, but when they asked for Anthony’s home address and he simply pointed at the funeral home next to the cemetery, their curiosity was assuaged.
As the EMS team packed the body up on the stretcher, Anthony felt Josy poke him in the arm. “You think they were related?”
“Who?” he asked.
Josy raised an eyebrow. “The old lady and the guy from the grave. They had the same last name.”
“Oh. I mean, yeah, probably. Why else would you visit a grave?”
Josy shrugged. “Some people are weird. You never know. Listen, man, are you all right? You seem kind of out of it.”
Anthony shook his head. “No, I’m fine. Sorry. I’ve just been thinking about a lot today.”
Josy patted his arm reassuringly. “If you’re sure. Hey, do you still wanna come over and hang with us? Now that we both need a distraction?”
Anthony waved his hands noncommittally. “Might as well. Only if I can skim some of your candy.”
“Be our guest,” Josy replied as she resumed walking through the cemetery.
Anthony began to shift his weight, about to take a step forward when an odd chill hit the back of his neck. It was October, sure, but they were in the heart of Florida. There was no cause for chills. He had a feeling what he was about to see.
Three years of avoiding ghosts told him to keep walking, to just move forward so he could leave the cemetery and try to spend at least part of the evening free of ghosts and pretending. The recently deceased were always more emotional than ghosts that had been around for a while. Then again, he remembered Ursula d’Orange. She’d been all jokes after her death, good-humored up until her funeral when she’d smiled sadly at her mother’s eulogy before disappearing from existence. In a weird way, he missed her.
Casting a glance over his shoulder, two friendly faces greeted him, one belonging to the elderly woman, the other to a mustachioed man he’d never seen before. Their spectral figures waved cheerily at him, before disappearing into the night. Anthony swallowed at their joviality. Maybe for every ghost like the one from the car crash, confused and terrified in a way that set Anthony on edge because this was one part of death he couldn’t stitch up, put foundation on and make it easier to swallow, there would be others like Ursula.
The figures had vanished, but Anthony felt the ball of dread he’d been holding in his chest for the past three years get a little bit smaller as he picked up a hand and waved at the empty space between trees.
Stephanie Howard is a senior from Three Forks, Montana, who is double-majoring in literary studies and creative writing. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming from Sink Hollow and The Albion Review. She enjoys gardening and being bad at video games.
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