Reptilian

Two of Five

 "I want to see my sister."

The priest looks up. He hasn't seen the woman in front of him for nearly a decade. He glances at the man standing next to her, older with graying hair at the temples, who waits with hands clasped behind his back. The service is over and people trickle out of the chapel where they found the young girl three days prior. They take the back exit, as to avoid the front steps.

The priest smiles sadly.

"We're just about to move her to the cemetery, my dear."

"Then let me see her now," she insists.

The priest presses his lips, expecting the man to say something. Chide her, or at least throw a reproachful look. Instead, he offers his hand and a friendly smile.

"Doctor Arnold Jeffry, pleased to meet you. I understand the delicacy of the situation, sir, but I'm sure that you understand that Miss Yates only wants to say a final goodbye to her sister."

The priest looks between the doctor and the woman, whose unnerving gaze leaves no room for refusal. She is supposed to look like the deceased, but her face is sharp as a fox's, stern where the girl was gentle.

"Very well," he says. "I'll give you a minute."

The priest shows them into a back room, where they moved the casket just moments before. The blinds are open, dust dancing in the sunlight. The smell of old books coats the walls, their faded spines surrounding the dark mahogany casket resting on a raised platform like a shrine. She recalls a whispered comment during the service that the family wanted the casket to be open — and changed their minds upon seeing their daughter's state.

The priest leaves the room, and the couple steps closer.

"Should I?" Arnold asks.

She nods, teeth grinding in expectation.

He opens the casket, the creaking wood raising goosebumps down her arms. Both lean in, looking down at the dead girl. Her upper body is covered with a thick white shawl and a bouquet of white and yellow flowers rests between her rigid hands, attempting to create a semblance of serenity. Chrysanthemums and lilies, flowers fitting for the dead, but not for her. She always liked sunflowers better. She isn't wearing her usual thick glasses, and the light gray dress looks like something their mother picked. Somebody painted her face with caked layers of powders and creams, reddening her pale cheeks and lips, and combed her hay-colored hair. Despite the attempt to recreate a living body, smaller details jut out like exposed bones: the flesh bloated with gases, remains of a bloody foam slipping through cracked lips, broken fingernails and blackened fingertips. A sculpture molded with rotting flesh, the smell sticking to the air despite the strong perfume covering the corpse.

"So, this is Esther," Arnold says.

"Yes," she replies. "The youngest. Eleonora is the oldest. She didn't come."

This is the first time she has seen her sister in nine years.

The woman pries the bouquet off out of the corpse's hands, carefully loosening the stiff fingers. It is easier to think of Esther as an object of study. After years of biology classes, she is far more familiar with the coldness of a corpse than with her own sister. She places the flowers on the side of the coffin and lifts the shawl off Esther's chest.

"Are you sure?" Arnold asks. She isn't listening.

The skin underneath the fabric reveals a crisscross of bandages, and the woman slowly peels off the outer layer. The local mortician couldn't stitch the skin, too hard and thick after bleeding out, so he stapled it. The result is gruesome and eerie, amateur, even, which she notes with distaste. She wasn't expecting much from the funerary service, considering the circumstances, but Esther seems more like a retired rag doll, painted over to disguise the inability to sew her back together. The cut starts from each clavicle, meeting in the middle at the sternum, deepening and disappearing under the lace dress.

Arnold stands next to her, observing the cut.

"Do they have any leads?"

"No," she says quietly.

"They might want to look for someone who knows how to use a knife," he comments casually. "The cut is very precise."

She covers the body with the shawl. Knowing she could bring Arnold into this room, to this town, is one of the reasons she still holds onto their relationship, but that doesn't mean she wants to listen to a surgeon's observations on her sister's body. She feels suddenly protective of Esther, even if it is just shell of her, fighting the urge to tuck the mantle under her body like she did with blankets when Esther was young. She touches Esther's arm briefly, only to flinch upon feeling the coldness of the skin.

She wishes she didn't know what would happen to Esther's body once they put it under the ground, as the years pass. She wishes she could pretend Esther would look the same as she did right now in fifty years, instead of the decomposed flesh and bare bones she would soon become.

"We should go," Arnold says, looking at the door. She nods and steps away from the body, keeping her eyes on Esther's face. He closes the casket again and places a hand on her shoulder. She wants to push him away. Instead, she tenses her body into a knot of marble muscles and lets him guide her outside and through the people whose eyes follow them. Their whispers lick the back of her neck, scrape her spine with long fingernails. She keeps her eyes forward, vacant.

She's the one who left for university. Some kind of scientist, I heard.

And the man? Not her husband, I'm sure. I don't see a ring.

How old is he? Did she go to college to seduce professors?

Well, do you remember the other sister?

The town whore.

Arnold's arms close around her shoulders, shielding away hungry stares. She wants to pry his fingers off, despite his best intentions. He doesn't see how it makes her look weaker, more fragile. Yet she can't make herself appear stronger, not as they whisper the circumstances of Esther's death, not as they comment on the tragedy as if it happened in a book, not to someone they knew. She pulls her charcoal scarf higher, hiding as much of her face as she can.

When they get to the car, he opens the door for her.

"Are you sure you don't want to go to the reception?" He asks.

"No," she gets in. "My parents will be there."