Six Feet Over It

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FOR THE BODY you go to the mortuary. A lot of people don’t know this. Kids at school don’t know this. They think bodies come to us. They also think we’re out here at dusk with a pickax and a kerosene lantern, digging graves with a shovel, rotting, moonlit hands reaching from the upturned earth to pull us down with them. So dumb. Digging a grave really needs a backhoe, not just a shovel, and also we never see bodies dead or undead. By the time we get them they’re drained and dressed or burned, in a box and ready to be buried. It’s just a cemetery. We’re not living in the “Thriller” video.

What’s worse is when actual customers don’t get that bodies aren’t our thing. It’s so bad. Awful. Why doesn’t anyone tell them how to do it? The logistics? All we do is graves. That’s it. Well, and headstones. But they’re pretty much part and parcel so same diff.

Now the Pre-Needs, they know what’s up. They bought their graves a long time ago, before they needed them. But everyone else—I can’t blame them for not knowing because four months ago I had no idea either. I have to remember to be patient, because for crying out loud they’re here on sometimes the worst day of their lives. But then what do I know? I’m just a fourteen-year-old girl wearing jeans and a T-shirt trying to sell some graves, which—it’s just stupid. It looks stupid. I know this, Wade knows this, everyone knows this. It’s a really classy way to run a business, making your teenaged daughter sell graves because you’re too lazy to look farther than across the dinner table when searching for employees, but that’s Wade. No corner is too sacred to cut.

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