“Who left his hands like that?” my brother asks, pointing his chin toward the skeletal remains that protrude from our Father’s dark suit cuffs and lie neatly folded across his chest.

“The funeral home,” I say.

“He looks like a sea otter floating peacefully on his back,” sighs Alicia. My brother brought his new girlfriend to our Father’s exhumation, and she stands between my brother and me so it’s impossible to ignore her. Before the lid was uncovered, she handed out breath mints, saying they helped her back when she worked on cadavers.

In Greece, after a respectable amount of time has passed, the dead are disinterred to make room for freshly deceased bodies, but these days most families avoid the grueling ritual and allow the exhumation and purification of bones to be performed by professionals. My mother finds this disgraceful. She cared for Father’s failing body for the last year of his life, surely she could tend to his remains herself. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she said, which clearly meant, You don’t have to come if you want me to bear this on my own.

“He never held his hands like that,” continues my brother, which is true. Dad clasped his hands around his hip bones like firm C-clamps as he barked a list of groceries, asked what was for dinner, or said good morning as if he were addressing his regiment. This is how we would picture him for the rest of our lives, but he wouldn’t have fit into the coffin poised like Rembrandt’s stately man with arms akimbo.

“Jesus’s hands were crossed like this within his shroud,” sighs my mother. She sleeps on a soft pillow of faith every night, under a heavy blanket of doom, which is synonymous with faith, I’ve learned. “Uncross the hands, Jason,” my mother orders.

Jason fumbles with finger bones scattered like bits of shattered windshield but then decides to complete the uncrossing by lifting the arms by the sleeves of the suit and smoothing them down at Father’s sides. Mom purposely chose a rayon suit with a slow decomposition rate to keep Father from being “naked” but the hollow suit only makes him appear diminutive and unfamiliar, like a small man who bought my father’s old suit from a thrift shop.

I look away to pluck a few short white hairs off my jacket. I’m wearing the same black pantsuit that I bought for the funeral and wore to the memorial service of forty days, three months, six, and twelve. I’ve never worn it anywhere else, and it smells faintly of frankincense, beeswax, dried chrysanthemums, and mothballs, the latter dominating the bouquet. After the twelve-month memorial service I collapsed onto the couch in my suit and when I awoke in the dark, I found my cat sprawled across my lap and the cheese missing from a pizza I had left on the coffee table.

I can go straight to work in this suit afterwards. Everyone else is in jeans and sweaters, even my mother who looked me up and down with contempt for being the overdressed one. At work I’ll undo the bottom two buttons of the jacket while seated at my desk next to a bottle of water and a bowl of nuts, and at twelve-thirty, I’ll plug in a hotplate, heat up my lunch, and not have to worry if I’ll be invited out to eat with the others. I’ve made bite-sized cuts into my meal at home so that I won’t draw attention with the clatter of clawing cutlery. If I could, I would pee at my desk.

I’ve outgrown my excuses for painful shyness. Shy adults are perceived to be reclusive and misanthropic, but I’ve always had at least one best friend and I have been the most devoted companion. My best friend throughout childhood was my Icelandic pen pal, Margret. We worshiped Bjork equally and sent each other tapes of us singing in her otherworldly howl. When I was twenty-eight, I had gathered enough money to visit her and she invited me to her house for dinner and I met her partner, Gunnar, and her twin girls. The house was dressed entirely in blond oak except for a marble dining table and a cream colored couch, like a very elegant tree house. We drank loads of wine and sang and her girls rolled on the floor in their matching pajamas. While Gunnar tucked the girls in, Margret and I chatted softly on the cream couch until she fell asleep. I let myself out.

The next day she apologized on the phone, saying she worked long hours and with the girls she was just exhausted all the time. I spent the remainder of the trip on a bus tour seated beside a middle-aged German woman who thought I was also a lesbian. She explained the concept of Sehnsucht, or life-longing, as I looked out at the barren, wind-and-fire-eaten landscape. I believed she may have become my new best friend but before we parted she told me I lacked emotionale Intelligenz and took back the earmuffs she had given me.

+

“I want to have one last smoke with him,” says Mom, so she lights two cigarettes and hands one to Jason who holds it awkwardly near Dad’s teeth. Alicia heaves with spasms and turns away.

“What’s the matter with you?” asks Jason.

“Sorry, just nervous laughter. You know, death and all.” She covers her eyes with dark glasses. Alicia has narrow hips and painfully full lips that conjure a sort of fragile adolescent sultriness that drive creeps like my brother crazy. Alicia is thirty-two, but still. I glare at my brother who gives me the finger.

Mom enjoyed many cigarettes with Dad over the past four years. After arriving at his grave with flowers, I often discovered a cigarette stub buried cinder side up in the earth somewhere above his head. “Who would do such a thing?” I asked her and she shrugged and looked away. Mom had asked for a square of soil to be carved into the marble plate over Dad so that she could plant a rose bush blooming blood red above him. But Mom was never any good with plants and the rose bush was a strangled mess of twigs, speckled leaves, and cigarette filters.

The two cigarettes burn out just before the priest arrives to say prayer. He is somber, sympathetic, and brief, as there are several exhumations to preside over on this day, so my mother kisses the hand that she slips a rolled up bill into and thanks him before he is on his way. Then, she sighs deeply, pinches my Dad’s jacket at the lapels and lifts it into the air. Bones clatter to the ground like a sack of plastic toys spilling onto the floor. I admit that it’s a pleasing sound, like marbles rolling over a wooden xylophone.

For a while, I pictured Dad lying whole in there. I imagined the skin had been shed and hung from a hook on a bare wall for when his soul would need attire, and the bones connected like the skeleton dangling in my old biology class. I didn’t picture the bones floating in the dirt like tiny islands, jagged scraps of a mosaic waiting for the concrete sludge that would fill in and solidify the mass. Maybe that’s what my mother expected when she lifted him by the collar, that she would give the entire remains of him—not an empty jacket, not this heap of leftovers — one last embrace.

“Oops,” says Alicia.

“Why did you bring her?” I whisper to my brother.

“You know, she’s almost a doctor,” he says.

“Dad doesn’t need a doctor, let alone an almost-doctor.”

“For Mom.”

I look at Mom and notice for the first time that she is lightly sedated. She stares at a bone in her hand and then looks around as if she’s not sure what to do with it. Alicia spreads a clean white sheet beside her and says, “Here.” Alicia was in medical school three years ago and one day she was appointed a new cadaver. She swiftly cut it open up the middle like an oven bag around a leg of lamb and when she got to the face she realized it was Dani, a girl she used to play Barbies with when she was little. “Are you sure it was her?” I had asked.

“She had a round doughy scar on her left cheek that her brother gave her with a car cigarette lighter when she was five.” Alicia had cried so hard she had to be taken home.

“Why didn’t you go back? Were you afraid of running into more people you knew?”

“I realized I could only treat people I didn’t care for,” she had replied. “And that’s a terrible way to treat people.”

She slips another breath mint into my mother’s mouth, or is it another sedative? My mother smiles up at her like she would to a doctor, or to a daughter. My brother hands bones to my mother, who places them parallel like train tracks on the Summer Breeze-scented sheet. Alicia lifts each bone and rubs it with a towel drenched in chlorine as I take an extra long time folding Dad’s suit and socks.

Last night, I had a dream that I was married to a maggot and my husband brought me long juicy strips of meat and poured me red wine. I looked down at my steak and frowned. “This looks familiar,” I said.

“Eat up!” he cried, but I couldn’t. Time passed and I grew hungry and weak and my husband continued to bring me bigger, juicier cuts of meat. I licked my lips and asked, “What’s this?” And he said, “A raccoon hit by a post van,” and finally I was so famished I believed him and sunk my teeth into the cold pink flesh. After I was finished, I looked into a mirror and although I don’t know what maggots look like, I knew that I had become one.

Usually my dreams are long detailed depictions of myself performing tedious tasks: scraping dry food off a plate with a fork, filing a stack of forms, combing burrs out of my cat’s hair. If all this business of seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes just before lights out is true, will these be my last images? My hands laboring with integrity and monotony over a stubborn knot, an unpolished shoe, a spot on the rug? Better these honest flashes of the quotidian, of effort—the stuff of life—than a short reel of flings, flames and jaunts, lovers and friends who broke my heart.

+

I am grateful that my mother paid to leave my father interred for an extra year, to give the body time to “melt.” His bones are as smooth as piano keys. “I’m sorry,” my mother mutters, “For leaving you in this dark hole for so long. Look at the sun today. Feel the breeze.” We are well into winter and the smell of decay is above us, swaying from the treetops, occasionally floating downwards to stamp brown stains onto the marble: tiny insignificant imprints, fragrant and insolent but gone tomorrow.

Mom holds the skull in her lap like it’s a kitten, then slowly places it beside the other bones and folds the sheet above them ceremoniously with prayer. The caretaker comes back with a wooden receptacle, carefully lifts the bundle and expertly crams the bones inside. My mother watches the box travel toward the ossuary and whispers, “Rest. Rest now.” Alicia takes my mother’s hand in hers, and I see my mother squeeze the hand with all her strength and Alicia return the pressure. “All we are is flesh wrapped around bones,” she says with a clenched jaw, looking straight at me with such intensity I fear she knows I ate my own father in my dreams. But then she shakes her head, ashamed of her blasphemy and buries her face in Alicia’s shoulder.

+

The tour guide in Reykjavik told me a story about a pregnant woman who was driving on a country road late at night. She had gone to visit her sister who had made some cool Vichyssoise that the pregnant woman found deliriously refreshing. On the way back home, she passed a mound of mossy black rocks piled high like a wedding cake and she thought of turning back to leave some flowers for the sneaky elves that switch newborn babies, but she chuckled at the thought and anyway she had to pee badly after so much soup so she drove on. A little further down, she pressed her breaks suddenly before a small fox lying injured in the road. Her maternal instinct compelled her to get out of her car into the gaping blackness of the frozen night and quietly approach the still creature. She saw a puff of warm vapor escape its tiny mouth and she smiled. Just then a blue pickup truck sped around the curve and pounded its screaming brakes but still managed to hit the woman, knocking her back onto the asphalt. She immediately went into labor and because the baby was small, he slipped out in minutes. The trembling young driver held the slippery baby in his hands, speechless. He hadn’t had time to remove his beige leather gloves and they were stained black. The baby howled from the depths of its slick bubbling lungs and when this alarm sounded, the little fox hopped to its feet and ran into the trees.

This is how I remember the story when in fact, the tour guide said that the woman was taken to a hospital where she probably still lies in a coma, the baby fought for his life for three days until it returned to a womb-like silence, and the fox was an explosion, an abstract of entrails and bold color. I prefer the fairy tales that get us through the day, the ivory towers, pots of gold, spoonfuls of sugar and a gentle woodsman, always a kind stranger, some wild man creeping on the edge of civilization who by chance and senseless sacrifice saves the day.

The tour guide told me that story because I asked if people still believed in elves.

+

A funeral gathers a little further down and we hear weeping like thick ripples rolling across a gloomy sea. My mother lifts her head to greet the tidal wave of emotion, and I can tell that she is envious of the sharp, fresh pain. How shameful this dull old pain must seem to her. The mass of black bodies weaves through the pale tombstones like a poisoned stream. The graves are arranged so close, the gray-white marble like worn dingy plates stacked in a cupboard, every proper housewife’s nightmare: the persistence of dinginess, the impossibility of whiteness. “Fire,” whispers my mother. “When my turn comes, give me fire.” I try to suck in oxygen but the air squeezes its way into my chest like someone covered in rags and filth that tries to enter a bus and is pushed out by the offended throng. I look down into the empty coffin and it, too, is void of air, a vacuum.

“Another breath mint?” asks Alicia. My mother nods. I hear the dull rattle of pills against plastic and the weight on my chest rises. As I approach the two, Alicia smiles at me sweetly. I nod toward the bottle nestled in her palm and she beckons me closer. When I reach my hand out, like a tomb effigy of a supplicant angel, she takes it and pulls me into a tight embrace. It feels like a car crash and I try not to look, surely there is blood, there are spilled guts, there are violent dismemberments and wet, shiny organs where they shouldn’t be. Waves of shock rock my body like the aftermath of an explosion. She strokes my hair and whispers, “You’re going to need more of these.”

+++

Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Copper Nickel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Okay Donkey, trampset and other lovely journals.