Serena had been a basically okay person. She was the model of filial piety on her good days; raised two more or less functional adults whose defects were considered par for the course among their peers; helped contribute nominally to her parents’ funerals; produced a socially normative amount of waste carbon; and occasionally always had time for her friends.
No, thought Eleanor. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Nobody deserved to have this happen at their funeral. Nobody deserved their cousin Beatrice sitting at their funeral, sobbing slightly into a cloth, with a single, devastating whorl of clotted hairs dangling directly in the center of her back like a bloated tick on a chimpanzee’s spine. Nobody deserved to have that nightmarish snarl detach from the scalp of its host and dangle from their chair and slowly pendulum in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning at their funeral, doubtlessly drawing the eye and mind and overwhelming horror of every friend, relation, and staff member present, distracting them from the (heartfelt, touching, reassuring) eulogies being spoken at that very moment, Eleanor was sure of it, if only she could bring herself to look away from the oh my god was that dandruff or lice or just desiccated conditioner WHAT TH
For the good of cousin Beatrice, for the good of dear departed Serena, for the good of everyone present, for the good of society itself, something had to be done. Stealthily. Quickly. Carefully. The sort of thing one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.
Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. A swift, sure pluck. And lo, a little light and warmth was returned to the world, and the angels crept back into the room, and the eulogy concluded and was received with the care and attention that would have been denied it in a time and a place where such things were left to gallivant on the backs of chairs unseen and unheard.
“Hey.”
Eleanor was at peace. Eleanor was fine. Eleanor was thinking of ships in bottles, of tweezers manipulating threads; of hooks pulling masts upright.
“Hey.”
Eleanor was not thinking about what was curled inside the palm of her right hand like a tiny encrusted nightmare larva.
“Hey, get up. It’s almost your turn to say goodbye.”
Oh no. Eleanor had no pockets.
A gentle hand on her arm, deeply respectful of her bereavement. She shot upright, fist clenched for fight and flight, and found neither: oh god she was being sent down the aisle, oh god the coffin was in front of her, oh god she was going to be holding this travesty of a hank of a lock of keratinous waste until the service ended, oh god she could feel the oils and unguents coating and coagulating it seeping through her pores into her precious, vulnerable internal environment, oh god, oh god, oh god help her now, could any sign or symbol or power that be – good or evil or apathetic – send something at this moment to spare the life and mind of poor, poor Eleanor, so recently troubled by the death of her cousin?
And in precise response to that exact train of thought, Eleanor stood at Serena’s coffin, in which lay Serena, and a nice dress, and a small bouquet, and not much else. A well-fitted coffin, but a spacious one.
Lots and lots of room.
***
If she didn’t think about it as she did it, it was like she wasn’t doing it, right? It was just a thing that happened.
And Serena didn’t say anything at all.
There was no dinner afterwards – too many polite tears would water down the plates – but there was a small buffet, which Eleanor attended. She was careful to only eat with her left hand.
“It’ll come back to haunt us.”
“No it won’t there’s no proof,” said Eleanor reflexively. She’d just put a ship in a bottle, that was all.
“Oh but this all IS proof,” said the speaker, who she realized belatedly was not her conscience but a family friend(?) named Angus and about three glasses of red wine in excess. “She’s the first of our generation to go, you know, and in days to come, the pattern that began here will” and so on and on he went and Eleanor was once again able to re-enter the peaceful and confined space inside her head, as long as she didn’t look into the crowd and see the expanse of cousin Beatrice’s back.
Which was silly, because cousin Beatrice’s back was now fine, because someone had done something about that and everything was fine now. Finding this logic impeccable, Eleanor fastened and secured its latch with an extra glass, and then another, and then a bigger glass of something else. Then she found Angus again and got into an argument with him about municipal politics so she had a better reason to remember hating him for.
There was nothing else to remember hating him for, because nothing he said had reminded her of anything else she hadn’t not done.
***
It had rained all the following week, which Eleanor felt was unthematic (surely it should rain DURING a funeral), a stroke of good luck (even if it SHOULD rain during a funeral, few funeral attendees want to be the ones getting rained on), and a blessing.
She did her best work when it was miserable out. The low light, the tapping of raindrops, and the cool air all kept her brain comfortably filled with softly-grained static except for the parts moving her hands around, which could expand to fill her entire skull, body, and room in that order.
Tip tap tip, tick tick, tup tup on the roof. Tip tip tip tap tap tap on the worktable. Plink plank plunk plonk between them both. Wet and explosive above, dry and hard below. Perfect symmetry, perfect absence of harmony, all-encompassing and infinite and thus an excellent explanation for why she had carefully avoided noticing the other sound all morning.
It was not wet or dry or hard or explosive or anything else. It was soft and scuttling and it sounded like someone saying shhh, shh, shh-shh, shush-shuff, or maybe like an elder dog – one that looked like a mop – rustling in its bed to get comfortable. It was very difficult for Eleanor to completely ignore all of those things, especially since this was the second day in a row they’d been happening without stopping and her morning papers were probably slowly being melted into pulpy ink on her front doorstep.
She wondered if the paper delivery guy had seen anything. Then she wondered how she’d failed to avoid wondering that. Then she started wondering and didn’t stop and her hands started thinking about what they were doing and a needle-fine instrument swayed when it should’ve swung and took out a tiny little smokestack.
“Fuck,” she said. And with that – the first word spoken in days – everything snapped into focus: she was awake, and sapient, and an adult, and she was imprisoned in her own house because somehow she’d been so badly driven to anxiety by a mildly awkward moment at a funeral that she’d rather gaslight herself into reclusedom than look out her window to see what was making the funny noise outdoors, when it was almost certainly the stupid branches on the stupid tree in the stupid front yard getting waterlogged and snapping low enough to scrape at her door.
So Eleanor stood up (stumbling a bit – numb knees), and strode with (limping) purpose to her front door, where she looked out the window and saw a tangled lump of filthy hair, caked with dirt and clawing at her doorknob while trailing the (somewhat worse-for-wear) corpse of Serena, dress, withered flowers, and all.
“Fuck,” she repeated herself.
Then she went and got a glass and an extra glass and a bigger glass and thought things over until she passed out.
When she woke up, the bottle was empty and things made sense.
***
Eleanor looked at the door. Eleanor looked through the door. Eleanor stood before the door and took a deep, deep breath.
Then she opened the door – interrupting the hair mid-scratch – and held up the bottle.
“Hey. I’m sorry. Want a better place?”
***
It took a long time to brush and comb out the dirt and the grunge, strand by strand.
It took care and squinting and many lenses to rinse away the worst of the rot without washing the hairs down the drain.
It took tremendous, painstaking effort to fill the bottle without cramping or wadding, millimetre by millimetre.
It took deep and passionate focus to do this without inhaling too hard and gagging on the smell and letting your hands shake everywhere and ruin everything forever.
These were the sort of things one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.
Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. And it was Eleanor that held in her hands an empty and unlabelled wine bottle, one now filled to the brim with long, lustrous, full-bodied hair that looked as clean and fresh as anything a barbershop could bake.
“This will do for a long time yet,” she told it, as the cork went in. “And I’ll work out something with the will so it won’t happen twice. Okay?”
The light shone on the bottle when she turned it. She wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but her head hurt and her eyes itched and she was willing to let it be for now.
***
The funeral home helped with Serena’s return, not to mention with keeping it quiet. Nobody solicits business from people who let ships out of bottles.