Old Mal Manew, who’d picked up more years than any human had business to, was dead.
“Yep,” said her husband, picking up her frail, wasp-thin wrist and checking for a pulse. “She’s a goner. Blood’s as sluggish as a snail without a shell.”
“Always knew that’d be it,” agreed her oldest son, loudly. “Blood. Bad blood, that’s what she always said would get her. Bad blood.” Her next-oldest, next-youngest, and youngest sons murmured along with this and gave many forthright and firm nods.
“I don’t feel so bad,” said Mal in that soft little voice of hers. “I don’t feel like I’m done yet.”
The doctor put down her stethoscope and gave Mal a severe look. “Your thyroid is hyperthalimouse,” she explained with an air of resigned martyrdom. “Your vessels are squamous. Your liver has acute pelicanitis and tinnitus besides, and I could dance a fandango on top of your viscid vesicules and have room to twirl a baton in, too. You’re sunk and squat, my dear. Sunk and squat.” She tore off a corner of the pad she was scribbling on and slapped it against Mal’s forearm. “There, you see? Medically dead.”
Mal peered in close at the note through ninety years of cataracts and lo and behold, there it was in scribbled black and smudged white: Mallit Manew: dead.
“Oh dear,” she said, and sank a little deeper into the last soft part of her mattress. “Well then. I suppose there’s only one thing left to do.”
“Sell the jewelry and move to Bermuda?” asked her husband.
“Read the will?” asked the oldest son.
“Pay your bills?” asked the doctor, looking impatiently at her watch.
“Read the will!?” asked her fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, who were busy shuffling their feet and snickering at the wallpaper.
“Have a funeral,” said Mal Manew.
The shovel was a little older than Mal. She’d been given it by her mother, who’d replaced the blade, courtesy of HER mother, who’d replaced the handle, by way of HER mother, who’d bought it from a general store and snapped it over her sister-in-law’s head during an argument. Mal Manew had heard of the grandfather’s axe late in life, and had felt the sneaking suspicion that she’d been robbed.
Great-grandmother’s or no, it did good work. A little pit one-and-a-third Mals deep and one-Mal long and half-a-Mal wide had been scraped out in what felt like nothing at all. Time flies when you’re dead.
“Good enough,” said her husband. “It IS good enough, right?”
The doctor removed her tape measure from Mal’s ear. “Epidemiologically speaking, probably,” she said with a frown. “I’ll need to prescribe a course of calipers to be sure. Otherwise we can’t rule out meningitis.”
“Good enough it is!” said Mal’s oldest son. “Go on, in you get, in you go.”
Mal considered the little pit. It was just big enough to tuck her body in and turn over twice and say your prayers, which she did – careless, as always, of their destination.
Then she frowned. “No.”
It was a small little word, but it stopped her husband with the first shovelful already hoisted and ready. “No?” he asked.
“No, this won’t do,” she said, still quiet and polite and as solid as a mountain. “It’s not big enough.”
“Whad’ya mean?” asked her fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, playing with their phones and rolling their eyes. “It fits you, don’t it?”
Mal Manew shook her head, felt tendons clutch and tremble against her skull. “No,” she said. “It just barely fits my body. We’ll need a lot more space to fit all of me in here.”
Mal Manew’s desk was a good solid piece of oak. Decades of letters had been born and raised upon its surface before vanishing to parts unknown. There was no questioning that it was every bit as much Mal Manew as her body was, and it had its own importance to it that was impossible to reproduce outside its inclusion. It had its own sovereign center of gravity that could not be violated by that of any planet nor star. It had POMP.
It also necessitated the expansion of Mal Manew’s grave by a good three Mals in both directions.
“My arms hurt,” whined her oldest son. “Ow ow ouchies. Ow. Waah.”
“Shush,” said his father with good-natured contempt and spite. “Your mother’s tired of hearing you complain, not when she’s busy with leaving us and all. Right, Mal?”
“Well,” said Mal from her cot, in that tone of voice that announces I Do Not Want To Fuss to everyone in a clear and lying voice. “Well. Well.”
“Well what?”
“Well…what about my car?”
Mal Manew’s car was a hunk-of-junk that had been carefully tended and groomed into a piece-of-crap, operating on the grudging verge of automotive where vehicles dared not tread. There were little dents in the peddles where her feet touched, the chair was locked into position at a comfortable cramp that fit her spine like a vertebral glove. It smelled softly of old fast food and strawberry perfume and underlying that, her.
“My turn,” whined Mal Manew’s fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, fighting for control of the backhoe. “My turn.”
“Shut up,” said her oldest son without heat. “Big people are talking.” And he reached out with his arms and heaved and the other sons reached out with their legs and shoved and with a beep-beep-THUD down came Mal Manew’s car into her grave, next to her desk.
“I don’t know why you need it so badly,” fussed her husband.
“I’ve spent ninety-four years as me,” she said primly, stamping her cane with dainty authority “and twenty-two years of it had that car wrapped around them. It’s as necessary as my arms and legs.”
“And besides,” she said. “That’s not all.”
The pit expanded. The tomb deepened. There were layers and slips and strikes and good solid stratigraphy being made out of whole cloth and half bookcases and old teasets, memories made material being dumped in droves. And round and round and round the whole affair, spinning past bulldozers and backhoes and cementmixers with the unstoppable authority of a tugboat or a pilot fish, was Mal Manew, livelier and more urgent by the moment.
“Musn’t forget the keys,” she told her husband. “Be a dear and please grab them from my bedside table, will you?”
“On second thought,” she muttered to her son as he hurried off, “that table really needs to come too. Please?”
“You there!” she called out to her fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, who were taking a load off and toking up. “Go upstairs and get the bed! I spent good money on that mattress, and it’s got my vertebrae stamped into it initialed A through Z!”
Room after room, then finally, the house was nearly empty.
“NOW can we do the will?” asked her oldest son and also the other sons.
“Yeah,” said her fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, grumbling and griping.
“And about that life insurance…” asked her husband and the doctor simultaneously. They glared at each other and spoilt the rhythm, syncopating their gazes.
“Hmmmm,” said Mal Manew briskly. Then she shook her head.
“No. One more thing. The house simply must go.”
And so it did, as husbands and sons and doctors dug pits and planted dynamite and sank the whole property down twenty feet hard and fast. And then, finally then, they placed Mal Manew in her coffin – they had to lengthen it quite hurriedly, she seemed to be taller than before – and placed that coffin atop the rest of the things that had been Mal Manew, and they stepped back and readied the bulldozer that sat behind the mountain of dirt. It had been hauled in from Fort McMurray, and it reeked of money and turf.
“All clear!” said her husband.
“Full throttle!” yelled her oldest son and also her others.
“Carpe Cadaveratum,” seethed the doctor.
“Yeah, whatever,” said her fourteen and three quarters grandchildren, whittling obscene initials in whatever timber lay to hand.
“HOLD UP!” shouted a voice like the end of the world, and they flinched and dropped their keys. The monster sputtered to itself and stalled out.
It was Mal Manew, standing atop her coffin, chin outthrust and arms crossed in the most forboding and dreadful stance known to motherhood.
“You’re dead!” yelled her husband. “You’re all dead, and all of you that matters is buried! What more could you WANT, you old bat?”
“My family,” said Mal Manew. “Because if you aren’t me, then I don’t know what is.”
So they gave the doctor the life insurance and they trooped sullenly down into the mess of crockery and croquet and coupons and cookbooks and chandeliers and cram-pammed detritus that was Mal Manew (deceased), and she gave them all a hug, and then she skipped – skipped, pranced, twirled, for the first time in decades – up to the side of the bulldozer.
“Goodbye, Mal Manew!” she yelled out. And she kicked its side and stood back as it woke up and remembered to do its job.
She stood there for a minute, looking down at that godawful mess. What a ruckus always comes when a life ends, eh? A cluck of the tongue, a nod of that sharp chin, and off she strode, headed off for distant roads and who knew what.
Mal Manew hadn’t been a bad person. But she was dead now. It was time to move on.