Have You Ever Carried A Dead Body?         

Heavy. Stiff. Looks a lot like my father.

As my mother panics, crying down the oversized muumuu that she wears, which fills me with such an intense sense of shame that I cannot focus on the dead body or why I’m supposed to carry it anywhere. Like a parachute, the muumuu floats down her rounded body. In the dim light also makes her look passable as a character from a Tim Burton movie. Some amorphous blob of tears begging me to help her lift him unto the bed so that she can put socks on him.

She ignores the fact that he died naked on a toilet.

“He needs to be comfortable,” she mutters to herself as she digs on the floor for a pair of socks he got from one of his many stints in the hospital.

I start to think that missing the dead is like the end of one of your favorite television shows. There’s this inevitable gnawing at the longing in your brain that makes you wonder what the future would’ve been like in the next season – except it’s my dead father, and the future would’ve been speaking to him – and not another season of How I Met Your Mother.

She wants to play dress-up with his sagged skin and flattened bones.

That dead body that I’m supposed to carry from the bathroom floor to the bedroom, she wants to play dress-up with the sagged skins and flattened out bones.

I mostly want to scream that he’s fucking dead.

Instead, I slip my hands beneath his shoulders and try to ignore the fact that the body belonged to my father. I try to take most of the weight on my end – as it swings to-and-fro and we count to three – before shuttling him through gravity onto the bed.

“The socks,” my mother cries.

“The socks.”

I point to the socks on the floor.

And I call the nursing agency that sent people to his house to help him deal with the cancer. They say it’ll take an hour to get someone out there to pronounce him dead and another hour for the body to be taken away from the bed.

“What am I supposed to do with a dead body for that long?” I ask myself aloud.

“Say goodbye,” she says.

I shake my head.

Just keep carrying the body, I think.

I think.

Mathew Serback is an oven-cooked bacon wizard. At any wave of his wand, electric ovens across the country may open their heavy doors and whisper, 'Yes, daddy?' But Mathew doesn't like to be called daddy. He is believed to be the cause of all grease fires since 1987. 'The First Great American Novel: Where Parallel Lines Meet (A Story of Non-Sequiturs)' will be available through Atmosphere Press in late 2020 and beyond.