Dear Little Mortuary

by Elisa Luna Ady

Mak/Unsplash

There is […] a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique. — FLEUR JAEGGY

We held the light at the wrong slant, the cousins and I, like forgetting to floss our teeth or close the faucet. Someone dear to us had gone. It was the Anthropocene. A bit of light went a long way in Southern California. The cousins were cousins sometimes and aunts at others. Depended who asked. We entered the cemetery and became soapy, made-for-TV. Clear as day, the adults wanted free of us, to dry-heave in peace. No one was subtitled. It was church in reverse. Cousins and I decided we were having none of the visitation room. We raided the catering table, kept to the hard corners of the chapel, alone with our napkins and stockings. Excellent food: late-season fruit, German chocolate cake. Eventually the celebrity of the funeral grew exciting. I was eleven and whipping through the enclosed courtyard, the tunneled anterooms, old brickwork kohled by shadow, the cleaving shrubs — butterfly vine or Boston ivy, who knows now — gave me the impression of blended plastics taught to simulate vigor, a museum exhibit that breathed around you. Soon we were the exhibit around which mourners winnowed. Death was the plaque that pinioned us, its appeal immediate and adult in dimension. Poses we struck seemed sanguine, managerial. I wanted to dance, having few occasions for black dresses, or to develop a crush, a flight from routine, a rendezvous, but there were only cousins and grown-ups. Finally we were herded to the open casket. There, terminal artifact of the brown face whitened beneath formaldehyde and methanol and French chalk. That he’d hung himself had not occurred to me until the chalky throat, a smell that brought sick to my stomach. Back out we went into the nothing of afternoon, where the weather would not behave and the women in short veils shifted their weight from foot to foot, sweating. No more mannequin play. No more recessed museums or synthetic creepers. I was sorry and stupid for words. I longed to speak with God as I never had, bad black dress, romance cracking like drugstore makeup. Now I was doomed to go on, I was returning to pagan life, in point of fact, while up ahead they lowered Javier slowly into the impaled earth.

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Elisa Luna Ady is a writer from Southern California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Passages North, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she’s at work on a novel, a short story collection, and a poetry chapbook. Find her at www.elunady.net