I suppose I should start from the beginning. I needed a job, bad. I did not have a mode of transport other than my squeaky old bike. I had worse bikes in the past but this one was undersized and hard to pedal uphill. It was better than the bike I had where the left pedal would periodically fall off. I would end up having to kick it back onto the bike as I was riding it when I felt it sliding off to the side. This bike wasn’t ideal but it was all I had. For about a year in this new Dark Age this was my mode up transportation in the small town where I live. It served me well to get to where I was going. My first job was at a call-center here in town. It was one of those jobs that many people around had come and gone through. A job for people in between jobs, which I was, but this job had been special because it was the first job I had found in town. These were hard to come by.
I remember riding home at night from the call-center pushing uphill. For some reason I had thought to ride on the sidewalk instead of the bike lane. Some internal sense of self-preservation had pushed me there. I was wearing headphones listening to black metal (which was the style and genre of music I was very enamored by at the time). Suddenly, I felt a heavy blow strike me on my back over my left lung. I remember saying out loud, “I’m hit!” and I began to wobble to-and-fro momentarily but I was able to regain control of my steed. In the dark I saw a brown truck speeding off ahead of me. I had been egged. They got me good. I wore the egg for the next two or three days to work. Even to the point where it was rotting off of my black shirt. I wore it as a badge of honor, sort of an initiation into the Town where I was living. Small towns are finicky. Now I felt like I was someone. Someone worthy of being physically assaulted by an egg.
While I was working at the call-center I remember my manager talking about a job she had retrieving dead bodies for a mortuary. She had mentioned it and of course I probed her for stories. One where she was carrying a small child and accidentally dropped her. I remember the body was kept in the family refrigerator for some reason. Unreal. Disturbing yet fascinating all at the same time. When my time at the call-center had run it’s course and three bad Winters in a row had left my time at the ski-resort I had been working at was unfeasible. Naturally, as someone with a morbid curiosity I gravitated towards working for the mortuary. I had no idea really what to expect from this job but I was all-in. Now it was just a manner of actually getting the job.
My first experience at this mortuary had been approximately six years earlier when my mother had passed away. I remember going there with my father. I had recently graduated from film school so I had a camera with me. I was still in a state of denial. When someone is in denial of grief for a loved one sometimes they will just go about their day to day lives doing everyday things that they used to before the tragic event. So I suppose I was in one of the initial stages of grief, denial. It was all a blur. At the hospital at the time of her passing was the first time I had heard my father weep. It was a pale whimper which I hope never to hear again. Here was the stolid rock of our family standing before the love of his life, utterly destroyed by the event. I could only stand by and bare witness to the sad event. At the time, I felt nothing.
So I was at the mortuary with my father, he was meeting with an arranger and they were preparing my mothers cremation and going over paperwork. I was left to meander about the mortuary. I was inspired by the aesthetic. The sharp pungent odor of perfume was the first thing that hit me. The mortuary was heavily perfumed but the underlying stench of something ‘different’ permeated at the base layer of it’s essence. Something palpable yet unknown. An odor abhorrent to humans. The smell of death. And not just any death. The death of our own.
Meandering down the long hallway I enjoyed the aesthetic of everything. The yellow halogen lighting, the shining tissue box covers, the old silver curtains, everything. I was snapping photos down the hallway and in and out of various rooms until suddenly I came to a much larger room. This was the larger area where they would hold services. It was dark and there was a casket there. I was aghast. The casket was open. I hadn’t seen an open casket since I was very young. I believe it was the funeral of an old lady at my father’s church named Ruth Apple. I remember finding it odd that people were kissing her. My friend Sam told my that he felt his grandfathers chest at his open casket funeral and it had felt like wood.
Here I am standing at the entrance to the darkened room where obviously they are prepped for an open casket service for what appeared, by the pamphlet at the door, to be a one-hundred and twenty-three year old woman. Then, quickly I realized that this was a misprint. They had mis-typed the year of death into the computer which had led to a misprint on the flyers. So in fact this was actually a twenty-three year old woman who had committed suicide on Christmas day. Utterly tragic. My mother had died on New Years Eve morning. It was all the more disturbing that this young woman’s poor family would have to endure Christmas after Christmas with the grim memory of their departed. I can only imagine. The holidays become more difficult after these type of sad reminders. And here she was, lying in an open casket. Looking very vibrant and alive yet, not. I was a bit shocked by this. I took two photographs and I left the dark hall.
Upcoming chapters …
… Death Breath …
and
… The Hidden Service …
Raventooth 