Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, a young woman, Gravely Eaton, is stuck working at the family funeral home with a father she hates. The world is dying around her, but there seems no escape from her boring life with no friend...
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You've got to understand that my father was always fastidious about his hygiene and appearance. As a rule, funeral directors had to be a cut above immaculate. But, I suppose, things being what they were for dad, some concessions came with being dead. As it turned out, his most obvious shortcomings, at least in the beginning of his death state, were no sense of smell or taste. Lucky him! If father had known just how vile he reeked, he would've been mortified. Pun intended!
To say the least, the 20-minute cab ride from the ferry dock to the funeral parlor was miserable – air quality wise. Remarkably, the cabby didn't outright complain about dad's body odor, but it was clear that he wasn't taking the scenic route to stretch out the price of the fare. I mean, Toronto cab drivers can lead foot it against the best hackies in New York or L.A., but that guy was a born speed demon. If they gave out trophies to taxi drivers for ignoring posted school zone speed limits, blowing through amber traffic lights, deaking around streetcars, and dragging courier trucks to make the next green light, he would've taken the prize. Not that I complained about his efficiency.
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Dad sat in the back of the cab, and even with the windows cranked down, he was giving off fumes you couldn't ignore. I suppose the grizzled cabbie had seen and smelled everything his passengers could throw his way over the years. A few minutes into the trip, when the stench became the elephant in the car, I leaned over to the cabby and quietly apologized. Now I don't like lying, so when I told the driver that my father had an accident, I wasn't really fibbing. The driver's only reaction was a sympathetic shrug while holding his breath. Then he exhaled, "they changed our diapers, and what goes around, comes around." Father was oblivious to the situation and simply went on reading his novel.
I wasted no time getting dad onto the embalming table in the mortuary for a triage session. Job one was putting on my trusty charcoal respirator. Daddy stripped to his boxer shorts and I moved the mirror in front of him so he could contribute his two cents worth. He clued into his condition quickly and tried to brush away the black and green patches that were eating away at the grey skin on his chest. His poking only made ooze drip out of the incision I had made during the embalming process weeks prior. I used a cotton swab to tempt a few more maggots from his left ear. My hope was that the bugs were first generation and hadn't laid any more eggs in his cranium or moved down to his organs.
