by Kendra Fortmeyer (art by Fabrice Poussin)
The sirens kept coming to her house because she was dead. It was extremely annoying. Every hour or so another one would pull up and the police or EMTs or firemen would pile out. Mrs. Mann? they would call through the door. Or: Open up! It’s the police!
At the eleventh hour, a young hotshot in the volunteer fire department smashed in her door with an axe, and everything was much easier after that. They poured into the house hourly like ants, these men in helpful uniforms, only to find her dead and leave again. A shame, a shame, they muttered. All the expected words, heads shaking ruefully: too late, nothing to be done, et cetera. (Before the axe, they’d had to scale the gutter and parade in through the upstairs bedroom window, leaving several acrophobic policemen on the ground, wringing their hands.)
What good is it for you to come here and just leave again? Mrs. Mann wanted to ask. But then, what good did it do to come at all? Her body, in the parlor, had gone quite stiff; they’d spirited away the evidence (a book of alarming new philosophies they thought had scared her to death) hours ago. And yet here they came, the men, bustling through on the hour, chests puffed with good Samaritanism, stepping over her head (and the actual cause of death, a half-eaten anise biscuit) and muttering. A shame.
Mrs. Mann wondered if this was how death was for everyone: If you lived your entire life, paid your taxes, returned your library books on time and all that, just to get to the end and have to deal with more nonsense.
I am right here, you lunkheads, she bellowed at a soft-faced EMT whose facial hair was more mouse than stache. When he looked right through her (murmuring shame, congenially, to his colleague), Mrs. Mann jammed on her hat and stalked from the house to see what could be done. It was ghastly outside, a morbidly hot day, and the sidewalk was clustered with perspiring policemen. The line of them stretched down the street toward the town. Over the horizon, like ellipses, she could spy little trucks of them coming toward her house, wailing. The shrill siren chorus felt somehow overlarge, clumsy, like an adult villain in a children’s film, and Mrs. Mann would have laughed if she hadn’t been so horridly dead. What ho, she sighed to herself, for the cavalry.
She wished her husband was here to smooth things over. Mr. Mann, God rest him, had commanded rooms effortlessly – people flocked to him, laughed at his jokes. He wore his tall handsomeness absent-mindedly, like a hat he’d perpetually forgotten to take off when he came in from the cold. Mrs. Mann had both loved and resented his easy grace. She herself had been a small woman with features just on the forgettable side of pleasant; her whole life she had to fight to be seen. So then when people did see her, they saw a fighter, and that wasn’t her, not really. Or at least, wasn’t who she wanted to be. Speak quietly, her husband advised, and carry a big stick. But he was a sort of big stick himself, wasn’t he. And she, by his side, a shouting, stamping scamp of a thing. How easy it had been, the last forty years, to hang the furious force of her will quietly on the hat rack, let him steer them both through the world. And it for the better, wasn’t it: to let doors open for them, to learn patience, grudgingly, accept it as a form of grace.
Mrs. Mann traced the line of policemen (shame, shame) toward the center of town. In the square where the licensing office ought to be there was a new building, a pale, modern, lumpish thing rather like a spilled pudding with doors. Ms. Mann pushed her way inside. The person in charge was not immediately evident, but there was a crowded counter at one end, and a ticket machine on the wall, and a lot of people slumping around in chairs, looking wan. She approached the nearest and said, politely, Excuse me. What’s the wait?
The other woman looked past her, murmuring, A shame, a shame. She had, Mrs. Mann saw, a severed foot in her lap, soaking her skirt crimson. Mrs. Mann remembered how she’d spent her teenage years paralyzed with the fearful possibility of leaking menstrual blood onto her clothes. How for all the breathless terror, nothing ever came of it. And now here she was, dead.
Mrs. Mann looked out over the sea of people waiting and pursed her lips. With delicacy, she reached past the purple toes of the severed foot and plucked the woman’s number from her hand. Then she pushed through the crowd to the counter, tapped a bloody finger on its glass top.
Excuse me, she said. And then, biting down a fierce resentment, added, I’m dead.
Without looking up, the man at the counter said, Everyone’s dead.
Yes, she said, But I keep dying.
The glass counter was strewn with wrenches and lugnuts and coffee-ringed invoices. As she watched, the man carefully transcribed another. He had a fleck of ink up by his hairline. Did you take a number.
I’ve waited eleven hours already. How much longer will it be?
The man exhaled (Mrs. Mann marked, with envy) through his nose.
Name, he said. She told him, and he tapped a few keys on his computer. Ah, he said at last. Yours has been broken.
Oh, she said. She said it with a bit more bite than she intended. It’s broken. What a relief. He stared past her, and she said. Well. When will it be fixed.
He said, There’s a backlog.
Mrs. Mann twisted the bloodied ticket in her hands. In moments like this, Mr. Mann would chuckle, lay a hand at the small of her back. Ground her, comfortingly and infuriatingly, to the earth. But he wasn’t here now; she had buried him eight years ago, wild with grief. And he’d never have ended up here, anyway, in a death would gone so hideously awry; a manager would have rushed forward already, white-gloved, apologizing, So sorry for the mix-up, please, right this way, dessert on the house, while Mr. Mann demurred, smiling.
Mrs. Mann sniffed. All right, then. Tell me how to fix it. I’ll do it myself.
The man, for the first time, looked her up and down. Left his mouth twisting up. That’s all right, he said. Just sit tight, little lady. We’ll get to you.
Mrs. Mann smiled, thick with exhaustion, then picked up the wrench and smashed it through the display. Glass rained down on the curios below.
The man stammered, That’s not. You can’t. He lifted a finger to her face. I’ll call security.
Mrs. Mann snapped at his finger with her bare teeth. He flinched.
Marv, he called, over his shoulder. Marv! But Mrs. Mann had already turned and marched back into the street, wrench in her ghostly grip.
At the house, she shouldered past the ever-efficient policemen (a shame, a shame) and knelt beside her body. She had spent most of her life mourning all of her small unlovelinesses – thin upper lip, overlarge ears, a winestain on her neck she’d determined, in her teenage years, was what made her unlovable – and felt rather sorry for it now, how unkind she had been to that small stranger down there. Such a lot of time she’d wasted, waiting for someone to come along and save her from such beliefs.
The sirens crawled up and down the air outside as the men continued to stream in and out, unnoticing. But, Mrs. Mann felt quite firmly, she didn’t need them to, anymore. She wasn’t sure what she trusted them to do in the first place.
She knelt and put the wrench in her own hand, closing her cool fingers around its grip.
Go on, dear, she whispered. Give ‘em hell.
Kendra Fortmeyer is the author of the magical realist young adult novel Hole in the Middle and graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop with an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Her fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, One Story, The Toast, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. Kendra was born and raised in the woods of North Carolina, and in quiet moments, her heart creeps back to the green and sleepy Piedmont with cicada-thick trees. Recently, she had the privilege of returning to UT as the Visiting Fiction Writer; she’s currently writing about ghosts, sex, and teen girl agency in Austin, Texas.
(Artist) Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.
Artist’s Statement, “After the Dream,” photograph
In the images I capture I always seek the simplicity of the moment. This image suggests much through its sparse objects. The room is the place where dreams are made, alive during the night, they haunt the day, and await the moment to pounce again on the unsuspecting and grateful sleeper. The image suggests rest and the mystery surrounding the hours, the occupant of the bed will spend in jealous secrecy. Cold as it is deserted and flooded with the light of day, it hides in its brightness what great moments will be revealed in the dark of the night.