EXCERPT from the debut novel: BEAUTY TIPS FOR THE BEREAVED

If you enjoy reading this excerpt of the first 27 pages of Beauty Tips for the Bereaved, the semi-illustrated debut novel by Sunny Haralson, please consider supporting the Kickstarter to print the book: http://tinyurl.com/lfo9yag

BEAUTY TIPS FOR THE BEREAVED: Part I -- PEARLINE

Before I die, I set the Teddy Bear Weasel free. For a few seconds after I open the pink cage, he swivels and freezes—palms out as though he is begging for mercy—then splits into the tall grass. 

“I’ve always wanted a weasel!” my daughter had cried, months ago, when I presented him to her in my cupped hands. I don’t know if all hamsters do that thing with their arms, but it makes him look like a stuffed animal. That’s why we named him the Teddy Bear Weasel.

I line up the notes beside the bed and swallow a pill. I pick up my phone and text people goodbye. Nothing that would give me away. Although I thought for a long time that I would never find myself here again, it now seems inevitable.

I think of my last, unsuccessful attempt to end my life when I was sixteen years old. So much has happened since that day, it’s impossible to connect it to who I am now, like looking at my own baby photos.

She contemplates whether some whiskey and a bag of codeine will do the trick. She doesn’t look it up on the Internet because it doesn’t exist yet. She walks past an empty room full of typewriters to the school library, only to be disappointed to find nothing but “Dare to Say No” pamphlets listed under “Pharmacology” in the card catalog.

A search through the tattered encyclopedia she finds on the shelf at home, under the storybooks her mother saved from her childhood, is more useful. She folds open a beautiful, full-color cut-out of the human body, pulling it out of the back to its full length, peeling back an illustrated skeleton to reveal layers of intricate, individually cut organs attached by tabs to another body underneath made of nerves and muscles. She bends open the faded paper lungs. They reveal the blue and red heart, its sockets plugged into hundreds of thin, blue and red lines of ink, that stretch out and knit themselves into yet another human-shaped form.

“The Vascular System.” She reads the quaint script printed on the body’s foot when the paper lung suddenly crumbles between her fingers like one of the dried flowers pressed between the pages of her Granny Pearl’s Bible. She shakes the dust off and traces the veins that begin and end at the heart. All Roads Lead to Rome, she thinks, and imagines the bag of pills coursing through those highways, slowing the incessant beat by degrees, barely noticeable until it is finally stilled.

My sixteen-year-old self will wing it.

She will fail.

My thirty-six-year-old self will Google it. She will compare statistics about success rates, weighing the likelihood of failure against the risk of unpleasantness or excruciating pain.  

  Just hold on, says a little voice inside of me, but I ignore it. History has shown that my life is just going to keep getting worse no matter how hard I try. I have lost everything.

I don’t know it yet, but my father is beginning the process of committing his own suicide, a thousand miles away. We always were a lot alike.

I swallow a pill.

I check the Contacts on my phone to make sure there is no one I overlooked who might be torn up if they didn’t get a goodbye message from me.

  It occurs to me suddenly how funny it is that I am sending my suicide notes via text message, that I am spending my last moments texting at all. I wish I could share the joke with someone.

I swallow a pill.

I say a silent goodbye to each part of my body, from my head to my toes, much the same way I soothe my child to sleep.