Diane Josefowicz
They came to us during the confinement. They had nowhere else to go, and we took them in, of course we did. We knew how to handle them without dumping them into rivers or the few woods that were left. That was our job, and they were our jobs, and in that oscillation is a mystery.
We do a good business. Always did. She does the makeup and lays them out. I do the heavy lifting. We used to insist on cash, but then no one had cash anymore. Now we take payment in whatever’s available. In addition to the lifting, I also keep accounts.
One morning a job arrives, the face like an eggplant someone sat on. A note attached promises payment. It won’t be cash, the note says. Whatever it is, we’ll find it out back.
She pushes at the jowl, tries to turn the chin.
Looks like she died of a swelled head, she says.
No one cares how they look, not even when she gets done with them. They’re just glad someone else is taking care of it. It being: the problem. What to do with a body.
She has a gurney and a table. The table’s none too sturdy, and the gurney has a bum wheel from its previous life as a shopping cart. She covered the topside of the gurney with contact paper swiped from a hardware store in the last looting, when she was already coming up with her business plan. That’s what survived the catastrophe: entrepreneurialism, business plans, supplies. A sheet is stretched across the table for protection. Whenever she finds a candle, she rubs it all over the fabric so she can wipe the length of it down afterward. Reuse is everything these days.
If she gets busy, the jobs go on the floor. I’m the one who gets them off the gurney. I’ve got the brawn. Besides, they’re dead. If I bang something, well, it doesn’t matter all that much now, does it?
A man skis down the mountain on the periphery of my vision. Over and over, he goes down. I feel a pang each time he makes the last turn and disappears. Panging, I flip the jobs as if they were flapjacks or fried eggs, just to keep busy. The skier has red skis and a black parka. He makes spare, economic turns.
I want to know all the stories, how they died, where they came from. When the jobs come in, I try to catch the eye of the person who makes the delivery. If I manage to strike up a conversation, though, she comes out and shoos the visitor away. This is a situation, she says.
She means: it’s not a story.
I miss those days, days that were not situations.
She does the makeup her way, with heavy black eyeshadow and mascara that smears and runs. She has raccoon eyes. She begged to do my face so I let her, and now I have raccoon eyes too. All our jobs have raccoon eyes.
But she is good at dealing with lividity. For that she has a special makeup that she keeps in a velvet bag. She guards the bag the way I remember from before, when possessions could be guarded without fear. Now everything must be shared. Now sharing is not what you do to make your parents happy, it’s what you do to stay alive. People who don’t share disappear. We find them later, behind stone walls far from the where-house.
The warehouse?
Where we are.
I toe the gurney, causing the bum wheel to complain.
Stop it, she says.
She gets started with a dollop of her special makeup. As she smears it, the skin takes on a different color. Eventually the job will have a Miami tan.
When the jobs are done, they have raccoon eyes and Miami tans.
The red tone shades away the beard shadow, she says.
She smears the same cream on her chin, her upper lip. She has that problem, where her ovaries are proliferating and she is always battling her beard.
Where would I be without the spare button she ripped from her coat last winter, when mine wouldn’t close?
Where would she be without the ribbon I gave her, the one I’d been using it as a watchband?
I could spare the ribbon. I could keep the watch in my pocket. But her hair was in her eyes all the time. She couldn’t see what she was doing when she put her baby to the breast. She pulled her hair back and up, wrapped the ribbon around it. We hadn’t seen a pair of scissors in weeks. Scissors were from the time before. When my nails grew long, I bit them.
The snows came and came again. I was glad for the borrowed button. She was glad for my ribbon, I was sure of that. I hadn’t seen the baby in days.
Remember when spare buttons once came stitched into coat linings? The generosity! We took it for granted. You get what you pay for, we said then. We didn’t pay nearly enough. Give till it hurts, we were exhorted. I think of it and laugh. We are so beyond hurt now.
She kicks the stool out from under me. It goes down on one leg. I go down on the other. I scramble upright, ignoring my singing hip.
Just keeping you sharp, she says.
I hold my face neutral. It is important to let her believe she’s doing me a favor.
When she removes the stopper from the drain, the breaking suction makes me jump.
She holds a mirror under the eggplant nose, checking for breathing. The mirror’s a joke. No one’s breathing.
Outside I find the payment: a pair of skis with the boots still in them, poles crossed upright in the snow.
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Diane Josefowicz is the author of a novel, Ready, Set, Oh (Flexible Press, 2022); a novella, L’Air du Temps (1985) (Regal House, 2024); and Guardians & Saints: Stories (Cornerstone Press, 2025). She serves as books editor for Necessary Fiction, associate fiction editor at West Trade Review, and as managing editor at The Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest site devoted to Victoriana. She lives in Providence, RI. Learn more: www.dianejosefowicz.com