When the night-shift orderly, on his way back to his quarters, told me that Mrs. Dunhill had died again, I knew I was in for a busy morning. Family is seldom present for a second death, so much of the burden falls to the admin staff to put the deceased’s affairs in order. In many ways, a first death is a much simpler affair, so those who opt for an additional death do so only when circumstances make it worthwhile. Mrs. Dunhill was one of those individuals.
It had only been six and a half years since Mrs. Dunhill arrived at our facility. Her daughter, Shelley Dunhill, herself in her early sixties, called rarely. Our residents are kept in a medically induced coma and communicate only through vital signs. On those few occasions, usually around Christmas, when Shelley did call, her speech was slurred, and she seemed less anxious about her mother’s quality of life and more about the quantity.
“Do you think she’ll live mush longer?” she asked one Christmas Eve.
“It’s hard to say, Miss Dunhill. We don’t like to speculate.” I pulled up her mother’s vitals on my screen.
“I want her to live forever.” Mrs. Dunhill’s minimal brain activity plodded forward, showing no signs of abating. If someone asked me to draw a graph of forever, this is what I would draw. “I mean that,” Shelley added as if I’d challenged her. “Forever.”
“Have a good holiday, Miss Dunhill,” I told her, eager to get to the staff potluck before all the canned cranberry sauce was gone. “I’ll talk to you next year.”
“Next year,” she echoed. “That’s just a few days away. You think she’ll die that soon?”
“She’s already dead,” I pointed out.
I didn’t know how Shelley Dunhill would react to her mother’s second death, but I assumed she would absorb the news with her typical aplomb. After lunch, I made the phone call. The satellite line had a lot of static. Forever, I thought. Static is what forever sounds like.
A click, followed by a weak “hello?”
“Miss Dunhill?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has just passed.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
She was silent then, and the longer she was quiet, the louder the static became. When she did speak again, it was like the static had become an ocean, and she was drowning in it, filling her mouth with buzz and spitting it back out with words.
“What do I do?”
Fortunately, I am well-acquainted with death and all its niceties. I explained that her mother’s body would be disposed of according to the dictates of her will. That description was usually received better than telling the next of kin that the bodily remains would be incinerated and the ashes flushed down to the ocean floor beneath the facility.
“Do I need to …?”
I interrupted her before she had to say it. “No, Miss Dunhill. We take care of everything. As the police are fond of saying—‘nothing to see here.’” I omitted ‘please disperse,’ though I considered it an appropriate phrase to get her off the phone.
The buzz crescendoed like a wave.
“Your lawyer will be in touch, Miss Dunhill.”
“Okay.”
“Please disperse.” I hung up the phone before she could say anything else.
Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His stories, plays, and experimental fiction have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Always Crashing (Pushcart Prize nominee), Collaborature, Encephalon Journal, Excuse Me Magazine, Gargoyle Online, New Myths, Oyez Review, The Scop, Shoegaze Literary, Slippery Elm, Variant Lit, and Verdant Literary Journal.
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