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“My uncle Ray is an undertaker.”
On a tiny table, Doc found an open tin of Vicks VapoRub. He swiped a fingerful beneath his nose and handed it to the others so they could do the same. Ling shut her eyes for a few seconds and waited for the nausea to pass.
“This here’s a cooling table,” Doc continued. “It’s got holes in it. You’ve got to drain the fluids so gases don’t build up inside the body. I’m guessing the embalmer was just getting started when whatever happened happened. That’s why the body’s all blown up like that.”
Alma gagged and spat. “I will never eat again.”
“Definitely not aspic,” Jericho muttered.
“Ugh. Aspic? It’s like stiff jelly.” Ling picked up a pair of scissors.
“You had to say stiff?” Alma growled. “No! Li—Mary! Don’t you dare—”
Ling poked the swollen corpse with the tip of the scissors. The skin split open.
“Why did you do that?” Alma cried.
“I don’t know. I just… had to.” Blushing, Ling dropped the scissors in a bowl. “I was… curious.”
Alma shook her head. “Lord Almighty.”
“Folks left in a hurry. That body’s been there for weeks,” Doc said. “Who would run off and leave a dead body on the table?”
“So far, it’s the only person we’ve seen in this town,” Jericho said.
“Yeah. Don’t that seem mighty odd to you?”
“This whole town feels like it’s been embalmed, too,” Alma said, spritzing herself and the room with an atomizer of perfume she’d taken from her purse.
“Yes. Preserved,” Ling said. She wanted to look away from the dead body but found herself oddly fascinated. The man was naked, and that alone caused her to blush. Her true fascination, though, was for the man’s ravaged state. In the end, this was what happened to everyone. One minute, you were gloriously alive. A sentient creature. Making plans. Full of purpose. The next, you were a cadaver on a cooling table in a funeral parlor with purpled fingertips and yellowed, engorged skin ready to burst. You were stiff and cold and just plain gone. Ling had seen the dead before. Cleaned up. Prepared. She’d even talked to spirits in dreams. But this sudden encounter with the cold reality of death was so startling and violent in its erasure of any illusion that one could escape it. The absence of life was palpable in the room. It made her desperate to prove how alive she was. She wanted to kiss Alma. To eat her father’s soup dumplings. To get out of this town. She wanted to think, because thinking made her feel so very alive, but right now, she was having trouble doing even that. The town was wrong. And had she seen Will back on the street? Or had she imagined it, a manifestation of her fear?
Flies swarmed around the lightbulbs and flitted past a tin of Bickmore Mortician’s Powder and tubs of paints and waxes, and then over a magazine, The Embalmer’s Monthly, open to an advertisement.
“‘Clark’s Hard Rubber Embalming Pump and Bulb Syringe and Extras.’ I don’t believe I want to know about the extras,” Alma said, her mouth turned downward in utter distaste. She threw her hands in the air. “I’ve had enough. There’s bound to be a filling station down the road. But I am not staying one more doggone minute in this tomb of a town.”
They left the funeral home and stepped back out into the street. The sky overhead was unsettled, announcing an approaching storm. Doc sneezed twice and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “This dust is getting to me.”
Across the street was a diner. The blinds were drawn at all of the windows except for one, where it was halfway up. Through the narrow space at the bottom, Ling could swear she saw people inside.
“Hey, I think I found them!” She moved her crutches forward, going faster than she should, feeling the ache in her hips. She’d need a long soak and some aspirin tonight if she hoped to get any sleep. Gold lettering across a front window identified the diner as the Blue Moon Cafe. Jericho pushed open the door to let Ling in.
“Hello?” Ling called into the semidarkness. On the luncheonette counter, cups of congealed coffee sat next to plates of rotting food being scavenged by clumps of flies. The stale air carried the punch of sour milk and rotting meat. More of those indeterminate shadows had been burned into the walls of the diner. It was still and quiet. No one was working behind the counter or in the kitchen, that Ling could see. But in the very back of the diner, a half dozen people were huddled around the same table—not eating. Not talking. Just sitting.
“Pardon me, do you have a filling station in town?” Alma called from the front door.
No one answered.
“We’re down to our last little bit,” Alma said nervously.
She was met with silence. Ling’s earlier apprehension became anger. It was like they were purposefully ignoring Alma, and Ling had a good idea as to why.
“The lady asked a simple question,” she said with an edge to her voice.
“Let’s just go,” Alma said in a stage whisper.
“Not yet,” Ling said and moved forward, maneuvering around tables on her way to the townspeople who were being so rude. She was almost to them when she noticed that the man on the end was covered in that same fine gray powder as the rest of Beckettsville. His hand rested on the table, and though the room was dark, Ling thought that his hand looked… unwell. Ling came to a stop. “Alma…” she started.
“So much… dust.” Doc said and sneezed hard.
