the series of r/nosleep | volume one: the {smile} series

{C}remation

The boy.

I raised the scissors up in what I thought was an intimidating pose. "Don't be moving. Don't be moving. Don't be moving...," I chanted in my head; a prayer to a god or gods or whatever was enjoying this shit-show. "Please, please don't be moving." My eyes cut from the instrument table to the grossing station along one wall, to the sealed concrete floor that concaved into a drain under the table, and then up the table to two tiny feet that shone a waxy pink in the harsh overhead lights. The toes moved. "They didn't move, Cassie. You just blinked." I stared at them for thirty seconds, wanting them not to move, but somehow hoping they would. They didn't and I traced up the rest of the body with my eyes. "Definitely dead," I thought.

And then something launched itself against the outside of the door.

I screamed. Of course I screamed. I screamed so loud I looked over to see if the woman on the gurney would sit up and tell me to keep it down because she was trying to sleep. The scissors clanged to the floor. They weren't just dropped, they were propelled against the steel door with all the force I, the person directly referenced in the insult "you throw like a girl" because I am that girl, could muster. I squatted down and covered my head, because I heard somewhere that's what you do when everything goes freakin' bonkers, and kept screaming.

On my third pause for air I realized that everything was dead quiet again. "Dead quiet? Nice one, Cassie," I thought and pulled myself up off the floor. My hands brushed the fingertips of the boy on the table and I was half tempted to either hold his hand for comfort or crouch back down and start screaming again until the Army, or Navy, or freakin' Marines blasted through that door to rescue me. "Daddy was a Marine," I thought.

Fuck.

What would my dad think of his only daughter, crouched on the floor of an over-sized refrigerator, scared of some random noises outside? The trembling in my arms slowed, my lip stopped quivering. "It's probably just Anita moving in a new table," I thought. "Or maybe they're replacing the propane for the cremator." The latter was probably true. We hadn't gotten new propane in months, so we were due for a refill. "Just poke your head out, Cassie," I said to myself and the two cold bodies behind me. "Just poke your head out and see."

My fingers grasped the metal latch and pulled up. Stuck.

"Fuck this, I'm done," I said as panic started to wash over me. And then, in some rational part of my brain my dad said, "Push down, Cassandra." I was calm again. "Duh," I thought and pushed the latch down. The door opened outward with a soft release of air.

The basement of the funeral home goes the full length of the building, but the building itself is not that big, so when standing at the partially open door of cold storage and looking out one can see the big gaping metal mouth of the industrial furnace the house was built around forty years ago. Brickwork lines the outside of the furnace marred black from residual blow-back after years of "cooks". A rack of rollers stand on metal stilts and angle into the furnace's mouth like a long, silver ridged tongue. Today the rollers were empty, but the mouth was open. Fire licked up on the inside of the furnace casting the entire side of the building in a blue-red strobe. A black shadow inside the mouth twitched and thrashed in the flames.

Twitched and thrashed.

I thought I was blinking again, I thought my eyes were lying, so I stared. My head poking out from behind the clean steel door looking across floors grooved by years of gurneys into the wide mouth of a furnace where a black object morphed to ashes and twitched. I stared until the light from the flames hurt my eyes and left rose blooms of red on the backs of my lids when they were closed. I blinked out what I thought I saw, re-saw the image, and tried to blink it out again. "Definitely twitching," I thought. "Maybe it's just a cross-breeze coming down through the chimney -"

And then it screamed.

A howling painful yell ripped from the throat of whatever burned in that fire. A scream of seizure and ecstasy. A scream both primal and knowledgeable enough to know that this sound was the last imprint it would leave on the world. A scream that gurgled out with the boiling blood of its throat until nothing was left but the soft whimpering pleas of the remaining dust.

I slammed the metal door behind me and latched it shut. I slid to the floor and tucked my head between my knees and covered my head. I stayed in that position for what seemed like hours but could have been minutes when the Marines finally came knocking at the door.

"Cassie?" the Marine who sounded an awful lot like Anita Reynolds said from outside the door. "Cassie are you almost done with the wash down?"

"Almost," I found myself replying. "Almost. Give me another few minutes."

"Okay," the voice said, and then it was gone.

I found myself standing, picking the scissors up off the floor, and putting them back on the instrument table. I thumbed down the switch on the shower head. "That wasn't really a scream," I said to the dead in the room. "I mean, it was definitely not a scream, right?" I took their silence as affirmation. I went back to washing the boy and his mother and never mentioned what I saw or heard.

When weird things happen at work in a mortuary you tend to ignore them, because the perks are good.