Leaving in the Wake
Friend refused to be buried in accordance with tradition. No casket. No procession. Friend hated the idea of it all and swore that he’d feel claustrophobic even in death. This, of course, was just a passing conversation we had once, as we were in our twenties and working retail while we waited for our degrees to arrive in the mail. It did not come soon enough for Friend, and so his mother left it sitting in a drawer somewhere, unsure what to do with it since that semi-truck jack-knifed on a whole lot of road. We told Friend’s mother about his wishes, and though it took quite a bit of convincing, she came to reason. After consulting some lawyers and a poorly paid office assistant, we realized that we could—in fact—hold onto Friend’s corpse indefinitely so long as we kept from cooking him as meat-stuff or eventually tossing him into a dumpster due to the inevitable smell.
We decided to take turns caring for Friend’s corpse, his mother having the first go since she was old and likely close to death. We were right, as she passed just a few months later, though from suicide. Couldn’t cope with the loss, we supposed. I was the first to inherit Friend after that, and there was much to inherit as Friend and his mother had no surviving next of kin willing to take on the load. For days I struggled to separate useful from useless. Hardest of all was the clothing Friend had amassed post-mortem. Evidently, his mother had gone out of her way to dress Friend in a new outfit each day, all expensive, all with pretty price tags still attached and numbers that made my eyes go big as basketballs. I settled on eight outfits to keep for Friend—one for each day of the week, plus one for an emergency—and sold the rest. I’d hoped to return them initially, but the stench of Friend had settled in between the stitches, even in the never-worn ones, so I had to remove the tags and wash them twice with some heavy-duty detergent.
The chunk of change they brought was enough to have Friend’s mother cremated and set in a nice urn on her bedroom shelf, the bedroom we all decided was best meant for Friend now. We tried our best to keep Friend from smelling worse: slathered him in scented lotion, brushed and flossed his teeth, even poured hydrogen peroxide on the squishy bits like the eyes just for good measure. Still, Friend fucking stank. We sold a few priceless family heirlooms—an ass-worn loveseat, a baby grand piano, a wedding dress—to afford some restorative surgery because, honestly, Friend was starting to look rough. We found a few surgeons willing to fix him up. His teeth were extracted and his mouth filled with porcelain look-alikes. They lacquered his skin with some medical-grade chemical that would hold up for a few years, though definitely leave him looking a bit shiny. They even plumped his dick with some silicone should “that ever be necessary.” We all laughed at that. We had to.
I was content with how Friend looked for a while. I adjusted to his quasi-mannequin shine and shape, but things kept going. His jaw hung open and allowed the putrid smell of liquefying organs to fill the house. His cheeks grew hollow. His head concave. It took a lot of scouring, but I managed to sell what wasn’t necessary—well, minus Friend’s Xbox, because I needed that, so I sold his mother’s urn and placed her ashes in an owl-shaped cookie jar—then found a taxidermist to insert a metal skeleton and pour sawdust into the cesspooling cavities. But even after all that, people noticed that Friend wasn’t looking too good, which made me quite depressed. The taxidermist didn’t get all the angles right; I mean, Friend would always let his head dip a bit to the left, but now his neck is permanently perfect. The surgeons put a good set of teeth in, but his upper front left incisor used to have a tiny chip in it from that time we all picked up rugby in high school.
Friend didn’t look right, and this made me fucking depressed, especially since all our friends had slowly gone on with their lives. Sure, they shared throwback photos on Facebook. They sent holiday texts, asking for a selfie with Friend, but I couldn’t go near him. No one stopped by anymore. No one came to check in on Friend or his mother or me or the house or even the Xbox, which I was eventually able to sell for just enough money to catch an Uber home. It hurt too much—looking at those lifeless marbles crammed into his skull, breathing in the chemical vapors that hung in the air, telling myself No, that wasn’t Friend; it was the house settling, maybe the pipes, and never believing it for one goddamn second. Places like that fester. Being there burned. I couldn’t even scroll through our old pictures anymore because all I could see was Friend’s body, how it used to be, how it sweat and bent and ached and did everything but stand still. Long after the days had lost their names, I set Friend up at the kitchen table, stiff arm somewhat wrapped around the cookie jar that held his mother’s ashes, and promised to be back by bedtime. I didn’t tell him where I was going. I don’t even remember if I closed the door on my way out.