Page 53 of Grave Love
My eyes flicker to the beach. Brody doesn’t care about the details of my job. About the fact that I do whatever the director tells me to do, even if that means coming in late so that the machines don’t disrupt an impromptu funeral service.
I tilt my chin at Brody, analyzing what the world actually sees when they look at him. His clean shirt. His ironed collar. He twitches, his shoes shifting against the lawn. Uncomfortable under my stare.
I want him out of here.
“What do you want?” I ask.
He scans the cemetery. A mourner stands over a grave, a bouquet of white roses in her hands. In front of her, six feet under, a corpse full of chemicals decays unnaturally, almost petrified in their doll-like state. I used to imagine Ren tucked inside of a stranger’s casket, her natural body rotting on top of a perfectly embalmed corpse. I used to picture scattering her pulverized bones in twenty different plastic urns, spreading her out to be shared with those families, like a used-up corpse slut.
The idea is unsavory now. A bad egg. Her corpse belongs with me. In Blountstown with the others. Or shit—maybe I’ll keep her in my house here, in Panama City Beach. I’m sure there are ways to keep a corpse from stinking up a place, and I’m willing to try new things.
It doesn’t matter though. She’s going to die, and I’m going to be the one to kill her. It’s as simple as that. Her body is just a body.
Just like my body. Like theirs.
Like my brother’s.
“Came to follow up on the recent business,” Brody says.
It clicks into place, then.The guilt.
“Good” people use guilt as a way to hide their true motivations. In all honesty, Brody probably doesn’t give a shit if my business associate—if Ren—lives or dies; he wants to know that he can’t be traced to her death. That his secret will die with my transaction. He used his connections so our mother’s death certificate read “natural causes”, and I bet that’s what he wants to do with Ren. He’s anxious to play his part so he can’t be implicated, and it pisses me off. He doesn’t have the balls to be linked to anyone’s death.
Until I die, Brody will always be under my thumb, frightened of my next move. And until Ren dies, both of us will be tied to her.
“Still alive,” I say.
My gaze lingers over the building, knowing the exact spot where Ren is behind the walls. Sitting at the chair next to the retorts, probably finishing up a few infants we have in the refrigeration unit. She’s been leaving them for the end of the day recently, as if she wants to be more productive and use every bit of her early morning energy she has on the harder bodies. The adults. Like us.
I hate that I know her habits.
“Here,” Brody says. He hands me another pill bottle, this timefilledwith capsules. “I brought more secobarbital.”
A door clunks in the distance. I shove the bottle in my pocket, then turn toward the mortuary. Ren floats along the side of the building like a raven, taking her perch against the wall. The white garden, orange in the evening light, waves to each side of her like glittering flames. There’s not a single trace of dirt on her body, but I still see it there. Covering her. Her cunt raised in the air. The globs of mud caking her face. Her open lips.
The desire in her eyes when she said that shewantedme to kill her with my cock inside of her.
How I believed her.
“Who is she?” Brody asks.
Ren Kono.
Not a corpse. Not a number. A woman. A name.
“Ren Kono?” Brody repeats.
I run a hand over my face. Did I say that out loud?
Fuck.
“Crematory operator,” I add, shoveling an air of indifference into my tone. I focus my attention back on the burial plot. As if Ren doesn’t mean shit to me.
Because shedoesn’tmean shit to me. She’s a future corpse. Any corpse would do. I can promise Brody that.
But it’s not true, is it? She’s the only one who doesn’t question the order of the world. Who sees things for what they are. Including me.
“Ren Kono,” Brody repeats.
