the series of r/nosleep | volume one: the {smile} series

{U}nderground

I never liked this job. This isn't something a little girl dreams of becoming. Well, maybe some girls, but not me. I always liked horses. When I was twelve I gathered the nerve to ask daddy for a pony and he laughed. A big belly laugh that reeked of whiskey and lavender. "Where are you going to keep a pony, Anita?" he asked. "Next to the coffins?"

Coffins and horses.

They all end up underground.

"Of course not!" I shouted back. "I'll take him someplace with wide open spaces like Kentucky or Spain!"

That elicited another roar of laughter. "Spain?!" he nearly choked on the word. "How are you going to get there? Is the pony going to fly first class?!" I remember storming out of the room after it became quite apparent his laughter wasn't going to stop.

Ten years later I married the first boy that looked like daddy, but acted completely different. We weren't happy, yet we weren't unhappy. We were amicable roommates who occasionally saw each other naked. He would spend his afternoons working on screenplays or reading up on old Cadillacs and I'd busy myself with flushing out body fluids and doing makeup on corpses. Rarely would we talk shop, rarely would we talk at all.

I guess it wasn't a surprise when he committed suicide.

The strange thing about dead bodies, I mean, if one takes a few minutes to contemplate what exactly qualifies as strange given the sub context, is that even after the proverbial life has left the more proverbial vessel, the husk just keeps twitching. I first came across this, and subsequently had my first waking terror, when I was six and wanted a sandwich. We weren't allowed to use knives, and by "we" I mean mother and I, so I needed daddy's permission to spread jelly on a toasted slice of wheat bread. He was in the "office", which is what we've called the prep room since before I could remember, and I was firmly planted between two unbreakable rules. Use a knife on my own, which would result in spankings, bed without dinner, and probably an unpleasant sharing of blame and beatings for my mother, or enter the office during working hours and, well, no penalty had yet been bestowed on this breakage, but the gruffness in which the law was passed down had led me to believe it was far worse than the knife violation. Being as they were, and given the age of the decider, I chose the more ambiguous rule and hoped for a lack of spankings. I was rather hungry, and the bread was already toasted.

I descended into the spotless main room. A large brick furnace stood to my right and an oversized refrigerator to my left. The rest of the room was empty. Unfortunately completely empty. A few times previously I had snuck down into the office to peek from the stairs when daddy was at a funeral or burying another customer. Curiosity is an evil drug that is considerably addictive to those below the age where reason begins replacing imagination. Each of the times I'd let myself venture into the basement the grand swath of white tile between the furnace and fridge would be inundated with gurneys and machines with hoses like octopus appendages. Those machines, the ones I'd come to find out later where the first of their kind to suck and drain the fluids out of bodies not quite ready to give up their hold, they were the ones that scared me the most, and on this day, the day I decided to take the unspoken punishment rather than let my sandwich be unjellied, all those machines were missing.

The furnace was prepping. Bluish brown flames flicked out of an arced mouth. A large exhaust fan pulled the hot, dry air out in great gusts and bellows. The house seemed to rock above me to the furnace's respiration. I turned my back to it, which being a six year old girl is no small feat. If one has never turned their back on a major fear just so they can face an even greater one, then one has never felt midday hunger for a crustless pb&j like I did that day. With a tiny shaking hand I knocked on the refrigerator door. It was a feeble knock, one that couldn't be heard in an empty cathedral, but somehow it met its target. The handle clicked. Clicked again, and then the door scratched its way open. My father stood in the doorway half astonished and half furious at his little daughter who dared interrupt his work.

"Where's your mother?" he sneered.

"At church," I said. We both knew that was a lie. Mother only went to church on the weekends, any other time she used that as an excuse meant she was... well, it meant she was most definitely not at church.

My father glowered. If I could have looked past the fluid stained butcher's apron I would have seen the flurry of emotions that twisted across his face. "What do you want?" he spit out at me.

My eyes picked up his words from the floor. "I need a knife," I whispered.

"What?!" There was a rustling of fabrics behind him. I looked up and his head was turned back towards the inside of the refrigerator.

"A knife," I repeated. His head swiveled back. For a moment it looked like his eyes were all black. "I ... I need it for my sandwich."

He blinked. A smile slipped into the corners of his mouth but never reached his eyes. "Then get a knife."

"But... you said I wasn't allowed –"

There was rustling behind him again. A soft moan. I tried to step to the side to see, but daddy blocked my view. I only caught a glimpse of blonde hair above a blue shirt on a gurney.

I started to ask what's going on, but daddy got to one knee and grabbed both my shoulders. He stared into my eyes. "Anita," he said. "You're a big girl now."

"I'm six."

"And you'll be seven in a few months. That's plenty old enough to use a butterknife by yourself. Someday you'll have to use far sharper instruments." He waved his hand behind him. I tried to follow it with my eyes, but he shifted again to block my view. "Go on upstairs and make your sandwich." He winked. I'd never seen my father wink before. It seemed like it took all his concentrated effort to pull off the movement.

"Okay," I whispered and turned towards the stairs.

"And Anita," my daddy added. "Tell your mother I wish to talk to her immediatelywhen she gets home." He clicked the handle up, it clicked a second time, and then the door scratched closed. I stood on the bottom step for a good two seconds before the burping furnace chased me back upstairs.

I still think about that day, the way the body moved behind daddy. It was the first callous that formed over any emotional connection I have with the deceased. A body is just a body. A horse is just a horse. It doesn't matter if it's a complete stranger or your own husband. You do the job, prep the body, aide those who can still mourn, and then make yourself a sandwich with whatever knife you choose.

When he died, my husband, not daddy, I had far too many people asking who would prepare his body. It was never an option. I would do it the same way I'd done so many others before him. It didn't matter if we were married, if he brought a fraction of humanity back into my life, or if he had a charred fetus lodged inside his abdomen. He was a husk. His life was a memory I would lock inside my heart and his body was a shell I would lock inside the ground. I loved the man, but once he died I didn't love the body. I drained the fluid, sewed everything back into the body, and painted his face. I'd like to think I imagined his death, I imagined the crumbled set of arms and legs that twitched in his gut, and that it was all bits of a distorted reality breaking through my callous, but part of me knows the truth and has known it since I was six.

Coffins and horses and husbands with curses.

I put them all underground.