A huge bag swallows the father, its zipper like his brother’s leather jacket,
if the track were drawn out for seven feet, plus two. Give or take.

Later the daughter will say there was an arrow stitched into the subdued heavy cloth,
white on black, pointing toward the future.

Later she will be told she remembers it wrong; it couldn’t have been cloth, or black. Shrouds—body bags, cadaver bags, cadaver pouches, transport bags, disaster bags, human remains pouches (HRPs), recovery bags, personnel pouches—are upjumped tarpaulins, made of polyethylene, blue or white. Maybe yellow, sometimes.

Nevertheless. White on black. That’s how she remembers it.

Back in 1988, they’re zipping him up so that he doesn’t get any colder.
   —if you look hard enough, you’ll see his soul rise to heaven
A puff of steam passes over a cup of stale coffee,
evaporates in a draft from the window.
The daughter will recognize this, later, as ample soul for the haunting—
that’s how she’ll remember it.

Laura McPherson (she/they) is based in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Night Picnic Journal, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Corvus Review, and others. Her hybrid chapbook inVISIBLE is out with Alien Buddha Press. Find her online at https://lauramcphersonwriter.com/ and on Twitter @silversatire.

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After the Flesh

Teddy asks: Can you talk a little bit about the history of charnel houses? I feel like I always hear this word as a literary cliché, particularly in depictions of war, but know less about the practices behind it. I’d love to hear more about how components of this are reflected in modern-day burial practices as well.

The word charnel comes from the same roots as carnal and carnival—the Latin carn- or caro, meaning flesh. In the context of a charnel house, however, the flesh is no longer involved.

A charnel house is a vault or building used to store skeletal remains, otherwise known as an ossuary. The catacombs of Paris are a well-known example. Others include the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic and the Skull Tower of Niš, Serbia (which is the coolest name I’ve encountered in a while).

Charnel houses are most often found in places where graves are reused, either because ground is scarce or difficult to dig, or because the influx of new occupants has outpaced the capacity of the cemeteries. Saint Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula maintains a working charnel house, as does Kkottongnae Village in South Korea.

Many countries in Europe have adopted the practice of reusing grave space. I’ve found articles discussing the “lift and deepen” method suggested in the UK, which means that a grave may be exhumed, deepened, and the original occupant reburied with a new tenant above them. I’m uncertain if this solution was ever put into practice, however. Other solutions include moving old remains to mass graves, ossuaries, or mausoleum niches, or cremating the remains and either returning them to their families or placing them in a columbarium. One problem with short-term grave leases, however, is that decomposition doesn’t follow a rigid deadline.

Porto, Portugal, for example, found that over half of the bodies in their cemetery were not fully decomposed upon initial exhumation, but instead were naturally mummifying. According to an article by Marianne Guenot in the Insider: “Per the law, the body can only be moved if it has decomposed so that it is just a skeleton, with no remaining soft tissue. To check this, gravediggers have to dig up the body to look at it. If it isn\’t decomposed enough, it gets buried again and the process repeats every two years until it is.”

I don’t mean to make light of what is assuredly an unpleasant process for the families involved, but it’s stressful enough using a public restroom with people waiting outside. I can’t imagine having someone repeatedly knock on my casket while I’m trying to putrefy in peace.

North America also has a history of charnel houses. Ossuary burial was practiced by the indigenous cultures of the Southeast, Middle Atlantic, and elsewhere. I don’t know enough about these cultures to discuss them, however, and would rather not spread outdated or insulting misinformation with a shallow Google search.

I find ossuaries beautiful, and would be delighted if the US adopted more skeleton-friendly options for final disposition. Not only is there cultural anti-bone prejudice to overcome, however, but as places like Porto show, the logistics can be tricky. Not to mention, as a citizen of Austin, Texas, my bones—and all the rest of me—are already being priced out of my usual haunts by an influx of corporations and real estate investors. Being buried the first time is expensive enough in America; an extra ossuary surcharge is not what most families need. I will continue to dream of a utopia where all the dead are equal and funeral options aren’t so cost-prohibitive.

The year winds down again. Nights grow cold and long. Spectral voices carry on the wind, and bony fingers tap ever-so-softly at the window panes. Distract the restless dead with questions, lest they ask too much of you!

Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.

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You’re sure you’ve been here before. You’ve met this perfumed man who watches you through glass organs below the wax mask. Before this, you searched for a mirror in this house without mirrors, and when you couldn’t find one, you found a sink. Thinking now at last you’ll locate your true likeness in water, you turn the taps. Nothing pours from the faucet. Instead, water splashes in a room elsewhere, alerting you in a smooth rush. A patch of darkness blooms in the ceiling above your head.

“Was it a happy memory you touched?” His voice is sibilant and distant, as if it comes from a phonograph in the next room. His face would be handsome, were it made of human skin instead of wax.

After wandering through this mansion, it’s a relief to encounter another person. Although puppet, rather than person, seems apt. What comes to mind when you look at him is the way some spiders adopt the shapes of ants, or the way a moth’s wings mimic the eyes of a hawk. Your host, if that’s what he is, reclines in one of the sitting room’s two armchairs. You suspect his glass eyes are purely decorative, yet notice how they dilate in anticipation as you hesitate in the doorway.

Hidden appendages move and stretch the pliant membrane of his wax mask. You can’t tell if he’s tall or short, fat or thin. There’s a fullness to his shape, a substantial weight. Its movements give the impression of a greeting, although his paraffin lips remain fixed under the slender line of a pencil mustache. “Please, do take a seat.”

The chair is warm. Recently occupied. Another body has left an indelible mark in the cushions. Time sags. You melt into the furrowed seat, compelled by sudden exhaustion.

“How late is it?” you ask.

“I would assume you, of all people, would know. You were the one who invited me in.”

Thick enough to taste it on your tongue, an odor announces itself: the sickening sweet decay of dead flowers preserved in a clouded glass vial. Houbigant Quelques Fleurs, isn’t it? You know it from musty bedrooms and funeral homes. An elderly woman’s scent of choice, maddeningly persistent and easily over-sprayed. Such silage emanates from the wax-faced man; you assume a storm of flowers this obscene exists to cover rancid filth. His paraffin face must belie a more hideous second visage yet to be seen. You cringe.

“Judgmental, aren’t we, dear?” he says, clucking his tongue, or what sounds like a tongue. You’re not sure if he has a mouth. Something seems too dry about his unmoving lips and teeth. Less a clucking than a regular, sustained resonance. An old ticking clock, deep and woody, driven by gears and springs. The sound is coming from inside his chest.

“I didn’t—this doesn’t make sense,” you protest.

“Yes, dear; you did.”

“I thought those things, I didn’t speak them. I would never.”

“Ahh, so you admit it. You don’t appreciate my original and singular aldehydic perfume? Within the nascent chypre genre, it predates similar and more commonly employed offerings from the House of Chanel. As rivals, there’s hardly room for comparison, though. Houbigant Quelques Fleurs is a time machine, as I like to say, even in light of unfortunate modern IFRA strangulation. It’s a story about the flowers. Nothing but the flowers. More than fifteen thousand different flower essences compose the body of the scent with bold, unapologetic grandiosity. I’m not joking with you, Madame. You recall the fragrance, perhaps, from a wedding day? Or was it a funeral procession where you encountered the name?”

Madame, he calls you. That feels right, although you’re not sure it wouldn’t have felt just as right had he called you Mademoiselle or Monsieur. Sharp pain radiates down the nerves of your forearms and across your knuckles. You realize your hands are shaking as you grip the arm of the chair tight, so tight. Pins and needles riddle your unsteady wrists. You can’t look down at your hands for fear you’ll see them as they truly are: quivering and blue-veined, tissue-paper skin stretched thin across your arthritic joints. A white finger bends like a bird’s claw. An oversized diamond tilts on the bone. A cadaver’s ring; a dead man’s band.

“This is just a dream,” you say in an old woman’s voice.

“Am I also dreaming, then?”

A troublesome question. “I don’t think you’re real.”

The perfumed man lifts a white-gloved hand and holds it over the spot on his embroidered vest where a heart should be, but you know it’s not a heart because you’ve heard the false sound, the hollow tick-tock of an imposter. “You wound me, Madame. But you’ve caught me in a forgiving mood. Have a bite. The orbs won’t work for me.”

“Orbs? What orbs?”

“Oh, dear. I can’t tell if you’re harassing or flirting with me.”

He flutters his waxen eyelids, and little paper lanterns flutter into your sight, tumbling lazily through the air like bubbles, perfect spheres glowing with inner light. One drifts close enough to reach, and though your arm is weak, emaciated, spotted with time’s unforgiving imprint, muscles sagging as if weighed down by an opiate languor, you manage because you must. You must eat. You grasp it. Firmer and fuller than you expected, its pliant surface belies its brittle appearance. It rests in your palm like a disembodied breast, the same warm temperature as living flesh.

You gnash into the soft orb with your teeth and spill into the rubble with a blast of bodily pain. The German rocket has turned the apartment that formed the nexus of your sixteen-year-long life into a broken sandcastle in a blink. The entire world’s weight presses into your chest, grinding at your sternum and ribs. Stone made into powder, rubble and airborne ash, and you know that some of the weight and dusty drift is what’s left of your parents. You hope they were lucky enough to die in that flickering instant when the quotidian miseries of an ordinary life became this endless moment of loss. Papa will not read to you at bedtime ever again. Maman will not fuss as you sew the hem unevenly on a new dress. The body that wore the dress now deformed in an instant.

You reach not with your arms, for they are pinned like the rest of you, limp and useless as the broken stems of trodden flowers, the remains of a cutting garden blasted by an untimely freeze, blackened petals turned to sludge and wilting with heavy shorn heads to meet the bare dirt; but with whatever force exists outside the body’s limitations. You reach for something greater than this earth, anything beyond this temporal suffocating agony.

The strangled voice of the old woman: “Please, please.”

Strange theft, she croaks your young dying words.

And now you are back in the mansion, on the sagging chair. Your tailbone hurts. The orb has spilled its mucilaginous pulp and slipped your hungry grasp. He is closer than he was before, or closer than you remember him being.

“What did you see?”

Mere inches separate the arm of the perfumed man’s chair from yours.

“My name is Daphne.”

The clucking sound again. “You shouldn’t trust the orbs. They’re like me, sensuous and exotic, but oh-so-naughty. Always lying about the most vital things.”

Why is he laughing? The name Daphne feels so natural. You want to argue this point and claim her as yours, but his face is shifting. Garbling, bubbling, sliding down his neck as the wax melts. You open your mouth to speak, but something plugs your throat. You know with instinctual and unaccountable certainty that if you comment on his dissolving mask, a vision more terrible than the disintegration and decay of the false face you’re witnessing will manifest. Runny wax self-obliterates. You turn away.

You hide from what hides beneath. The smell of vintage perfume blasts and buries you with a bomb of suffocating florals. Just as brutally and fast, it burns out. All fragrance vanishes. No smell at all.

This eerie emptiness in the air is worse. Excessive scent concealed the smell of lack. Nothingness is odorless; even sterile stone has a smell, even moss, and bombs, and ash as it hangs in the air becoming part of your lungs with every breath, even orbs becoming one with your flesh. The air outside especially has a distinctive fragrance after lightning or in those hesitant moments before the rain.

“Madame?”

“No.”

You won’t look. You can’t. You don’t want to know.

The voice is molten, bubbling into more effusive nothingness. “I thought we’d found you a happy one. But then, it’s so hard to tell the difference. To be honest, happy or sad, after a point all your stories begin to taste the same.”

The tug of wires, gloves, or memories lifting you from the chair. You’re waking up, but to what? Or maybe you’re falling asleep and dreaming your way into a better life. Falling and lifting, a seizure of hope. A flash. Then nothing.

This time he is not in the other chair when you arrive. You explore the vacant room with its two haggard empty chairs and their indented seat cushions. The orbs float like soap bubbles or dust motes, bouncing off each other and sparkling in the slanted lamplight. A single window you don’t remember from last time offers no reflection when you seek your face in the black pane. Staring through the window, unalloyed darkness gazes into you. You suspect it isn’t featureless, that, indeed, something waits outside and may soon take notice if you’re not careful. You dodge the faceless windowpane.

Tick tock tick tock. An old clock or the sound of beetle legs clicking? You turn. Now he hesitates where once it was you who filled the doorway. The chairs are gone. Maybe they were never there. The same waxen mask as last time smiles without smiling; the same fragrance assaults without apology.

But there is something different in the air. The perfume mixes with the sour sweat of unwashed desperation. The smell of struggle, and regret; a lifetime of human failings and false starts. Too human a smell to belong to him.

“There you are, little girl,” he says. When he finishes speaking, there’s a rattle of gears and the sound of something spooling.

You want to run, but he’s blocking the door. You’re afraid to speak this time. You shift one foot, and he moves in perfect sync. He imitates with a crab’s scuttle. Hidden under broad pinstriped trousers, his legs seem to bend not once at the knees, but at multiple joints.

You tilt your head. In this house without mirrors, he offers a perfect semblance, tilting his head with its cheap toupee and absurdly small hat. When you raise one hand, he does the same.

“What’s wrong, little girl? Don’t you trust me?”

You remember him. Or, at least, you have some memory of him. Daphne met him in this strange place in a prior dream, but Daphne isn’t a name that feels right for you, like a coat that won’t fit, too long in the sleeves, too heavy in the chest.

“You can’t keep still forever,” he says. “You’ll have to move eventually.”

Speaking would invite disaster. Your silence is the only thing keeping him back. He’s ravenous. You can tell from the dilated pupils of the glass eyes whirring within the waxen mask. He’s lying, too. Children sense these things. You can stay still forever, can’t you, but is that better than being devoured all at once?

Of course he follows your train of thought as if your voice sneaked out through your mouth, wriggling its tiny limbs and trying to fit its wings through the gates of your breath to fly free. “Have you considered why you’re here, little Brianne? Have you considered you’re here because of what you’ve done?”

You don’t want to listen. You’re a good girl. Papa always says so. The fragrance hanging in the air isn’t rain or stone or flowers. It isn’t quite ash. It’s something too adult for you; the aftertaste of an overdose. Cherry liqueur coats your throat.

The perfumed man mirrors your backward steps with retreating steps of his own. The tick-tock in his chest accelerates. The odor of cloying flowers returns like some repellant hypnosis. Your small hands clutch your dress. You take another step back, then another, and the distance between you grows, until he’s almost down the hallway, almost gone—

But the wall is at your back. The ticking in his chest purrs with predatory contentment.

Something touches your back. The wall is not a flat, papered surface. Wriggling appendages like fingers prod and work at your skin, growing sharper, faster, tearing through fabric and flesh as they search for the seam that, when pulled, will unravel you.

You push off the wall in panic. In that instant, your attention wavers. His waxen face rears up inches from yours, close enough you’d feel his breath if he had any breath, close enough to see the clicking beetles below his mask. Close enough he could grab you in his many-jointed arms if that weren’t a violation of the rules of this game, which hover unspoken at the perimeter of your awareness.

You take a step back. Who’s making the rules? Something is smiling under the false wax lips, something is assembling larval young into the form of a smile.

Maybe—

It catches your attention. You don’t dare turn away. An orb tumbles through your peripheral vision with inexorable intent. Even before the fleshy membrane touches your lips, pain blooms in your chest and drags you back to a life in its final moments of struggle many years in the future. The orb presses against your mouth and nose as you resist.

With whatever force exists outside the body’s limitations, you reach for something, anything outside this room, anything but this suffocating agony. You are not in the room anymore. You are not in the rubble left by the German rocket that turned your life into a broken sandcastle in a blink. The quotidian miseries of an ordinary life have become something much worse.

You are in your office again. Each evening finds you hunched over your escritoire with worsening osteoporosis, crooked spine, hammering away at the stubborn keys of your typewriter as the ribbon strains to keep pace with your possessed drive. You have so many stories. Tonight is different, though. Tonight the story machine lies still, and you sit at the edge of your bed not weeping when you should weep while the smell of cherry cordial filters up from the sofa downstairs. It finds you here without irony. The deadly fragrance wafts in and out as you breathe, sweetening into the sour smell of too much liquor. This is voluntary.

In the stillness, you begin to wonder if you’ve made a mistake. The same tincture you gave Henri tonight now works its fatal alchemy through your bloodstream, and you fear you’ve ended the story too soon.

Your body is already stiffening, muscles constricting and joints becoming disarticulated, but you manage to look into the rippling wine in your glass and see a face that might be yours, old and worn and jagged, gaunt cheekbones like the buttresses of crumbling cathedrals, lips like a sere seam of paper slit by a letter opener. Lipstick highlights the cracks.

The room smells like musk and mothballs of old age blooming below the bright and sickening cherry tones. Your skin is spotted. You remember her now.

Dame Daphne, the elderly mystery writer, foolishly borrowing a page from one of her femme fatales. She poisons her miserable husband, who made the mistake of sneaking out with another buxom assistant one too many times. In jealous rage, she decides to join him in a mortal tryst. Ridiculous, after everything she’s survived. This body won’t last, already its vision blurs around the corners like the creep of tarnish on silver. Soon, too soon, you’ll—

His tepid face of wax so close to your eyes, it doubles. The overpowering reek of dead flowers—you know it, but the burden of the name of the fragrance is now lost to you—the reek replaces whatever it is you’ve been breathing.

He could have you, and he will.

“I murdered my husband,” you say. A confession, complete with tears and a broken voice, except it’s the voice of a little girl, shrill and scared. Your tiny fingers cover your mouth as you cry, too young to understand the motives that made you kill.

“Someone murdered a man,” he replies. Won’t he set you free? Won’t your parents arrive and get you out of here? You can’t force yourself to move. Of course not—that would break the rules. The game isn’t over, just paused at his will. After he speaks, you notice in addition to the ticking clockwork a sound like a needle gliding over the grooves of a record hissing from inside his hollow body.

The fabric of the floor and walls shakes with thunderous footfalls. Sequestered within the vastness of this manse, someone or something else is moving. Something large. The perfumed man turns away from you. There’s a flaw in the wax on the back of his head, a hole with prehensile black hairs or pincers poking out of it. He says, “How lucky for you that someone else came along.”

Faster than anything human should move, he hurtles out through the doorway and scuttles back soon, too soon. You missed your chance to run. He’s different now. The cadence of his internal tick-tock slows to a satisfied sluggishness. His shape is different, swollen, distended. As you regard him in disgust, you realize the contours of his rotund beetle body are shifting as puppet hands and face struggle under his skin.

A puppet broken beneath the rubble. Another body up for grabs.

You feel the tacit stricture that bound you to this room lifting as you wake up.

Wake up. Or fall asleep. Wake up, damn it, or fall asleep. Whatever gets you out of here, whatever lets you escape from—

It’s your last chance. You can’t move.

“Tell me something, little girl. Besides what lurks beyond these walls, what else is lightless yet full of life?”

The spot on the ceiling from the running faucet spreads. The funeral perfume of flowers presses the entire world’s weight into your chest, small as you are, grinding at your sternum and ribs. It’s as if your bones have already been ground into powder, and you know that some of the weight is what’s left of your parents, who you hope were lucky enough to die in that flickering instant.

A flash. No regrets. You close your eyes to let in the bomb’s light.

And clad thusly, you enter the room where your old friend with his smell of horrid perfume is waiting for you again, seated in a sagging armchair. A tall stack of books sits to one side of him, and with the refined air of a true gentleman, he invites you to peruse. The books’ covers are featureless, plain cloth bindings. When you crack open the first of them, prepared to read the denouement and learn the solution to the mystery, the pages are filled as you’d expect, with what seem to be sentences made from words. But the words deform. You drop the ambiguous volume and grab another. Words swim around the page in melting phrases, shying from your attention and dissolving into streaming filaments of squirming ink, like the floaters, little fibers of protein that skate across the vitreous fluid of your aging and tired eyes.

You raise them, giving up on the story.

You close the book. You wear the false skin like an unmarked binding because you have known its likeness.

Before you got here, when you were searching through the endless tract of hallways, through the procession of empty rooms, you found one space with an enormous stone bench. Twelve identical masks, all made of paraffin wax, all with the same staring glass eyes and ridiculous false pencil mustache, waited upon it to be worn. And it occurred to you to take one and wear it over your own false face.

“Not much of a reader, are you, Lauren?” the perfumed man asks as you set the book down.

“That’s not my name.”

“Isn’t it? Try it out.”

“Lauren,” you say. And it fits. They all fit. But aren’t you Brianne, the scared child? Or are you Dame Daphne after all, possessed by foolish vengeance and intense regret? But they’re just figments, aren’t they? They must be, for you’ve learned your lesson today about futility. And anyway, you’re wearing the mask, and in finding the perfumed man you’ve found a mirror in a house with no mirrors.

“You’re right,” the perfumed man declares, although you haven’t said anything aloud. “Of course, you’re right, even if you change your mind in a split second. Neither Lauren nor Brianne is real. Neither am I, though you may accuse me of being named Henri in one of your more confused moments and slap my face in petty jealousy. Creations, characters from the oeuvre of the writer Daphne, figments left to die with the rotting brain of the woman who breathed imaginary life into them.”

“But Daphne died in the bomb blast. Her parents survived.”

“Did they?”

No, you’re not Daphne, even if you once were. The only memories you have of hers are what the orb gave you, and the orbs are liars. The only memories you have are the ones you choose, and you choose to believe her parents survived. All of this is the last, strangled votive of a dying girl entombed under forty tons of brick and concrete. A crushed breath whispering goodbye.

With the sudden inspiration that comes from knowing your own bomb-interred corpse, you know the answer. You remember the question he asked you before: What else is lightless, yet full of life?

“A stomach,” you say.

It starts with your face, where the mask you placed over your skin begins to melt and stretch. It reaches across your ears and down your throat and over your scalp, warm now, pliant as the living integuments it subsumes, or annexes, or reclaims. Whatever verb applies, whatever swimming fugitive word, you and the membrane fold inside out as a greater whole reincorporates by gentle seductive exfoliation. The fluid inside you builds. The embrace draws you inward, warm and all-encompassing, a bloated glowing center where you cannot be alone. Many larvae arrange themselves into your new face beneath the wax, where they feast. You’ll never be separate again. A smile blooms under the petaled sheath of paraffin lips.

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University. His speculative fiction work appears in Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Southwest Review, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. He is a PhD student at University of North Texas where he serves as the interviews editor at American Literary Review, and he is also an active HWA member. Find him on Twitter @joduckwo.

Joe Koch (he/they) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive. They’ve had over fifty short stories published in books and journals like Vastarien, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and The Queer Book of Saints. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

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the same way I hold wounded things,
the bird with the clipped wing,
the dazed moth,
scalded in search of light—
I run my hands on fraying walls,
curled fingers like a handle to clasp;
ghosts, I find
are always feeling through the dark
they fold into embraces,
all deadweight and dragging,
like they’ve forgotten how to be held.

Catheryne Gagnon lives in Tiohtià ke/Montreal with her cat Matilda and works in communications in the humanitarian field. Her poetry has been published in Black Fox, Rust+Moth, Roi Fainéant Press, Quail Bell and Moon Cola. When not writing, she can be found tending to her plants, searching for the best window seat at a café or looking for fireflies in dark woods. You can find her on twitter @CatheryneGagnon.

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Celebrating the dead begins with a song. An organist, pianist, or keyboardist—sometimes all three at once—pluck notes into the air. Tambourines rattle, their brass jingles sending shivers down the spines of the congregation. Then a sharp soprano croons, “If you wanna know, where I’m going, where I’m going, soon….” After a few lyrics, a chorus of rich Black voices joins the soprano, and they all belt out, “I’m goin’ up yonder to be with my Lord!”

“Goin’ Up Yonder” is the first song that comes to my mind when I hear of someone’s death in the Black community. Originally written by Walter Hawkins in 1975 for his album Love Alive, his wife Tramaine Hawkins, an award-winning gospel singer, sings my favorite rendition of the song. “Goin’ Up Yonder” is not the dirge you would expect at a funeral. It’s a powerful, energetic song. A send-off to the great beyond for the deceased, and a spiritual intravenous injection of encouragement for mourners.

“Goin’ Up Yonder” is not the only song that has a place at Black funerals. In our community, we could sing “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” or “I’ll Fly Away.” Hymns, spirituals, and upbeat gospel tempos all have a place in our bereavement because although we may find ourselves in the swell of grief, our funerals are also a time of jubilance and praise. Instead of dampening our voices, we lift them up, either heavenward or to the world around us.

For us, for Black people in America, we say goodbye to our dead with tears, but mostly with celebration and fellowship through our homegoings and repasts.

Homegoings

In Black American communities, our funeral ceremonies are called homegoings. Quite literally, homegoing means “going home,” and we do so vibrantly.

The term homegoing originated during slavery in the United States. Enslaved Africans believed that being unable to escape enslavement, they would achieve true freedom in death. Their souls would then return to Africa—to home. However, while enslaved, they were unable to mourn their dead sufficiently. White enslavers feared their African traditions and believed large gatherings would allow the enslaved to revolt. Thus, laws mandated that overseers had to be present for funerals, which became restricted under a white gaze.

Black funerary practices changed after the introduction and adoption of Christianity in enslaved populations. Instead of somber, dour experiences, Black people conducted lively funerals, which were still often dependent on an enslaver’s disposition toward the enslaved. They honored those who died because, although their bodies had been shackled, their souls were then free to go home to Heaven, to Glory, or whichever realm was home. How we mourned our dead became an act of spiritual and physical protest against enslavement and cultural erasure that further developed following the American Civil War, which resulted in elaborate homegoing services that persist today.

A homegoing can be distilled to a few key features. Many homegoings take place at a church. Most often it’s one that the deceased attended, a local community church, or one affiliated with the funeral parlor. Homegoings start with musical accompaniment, and attendees sing hymns periodically during the service. Sometimes there’s also a soloist or a choir who sings the songs. There are readings of the obituary, biblical scripture, and the eulogy. For extra elegance, someone may read a literature selection or a note expressing love and condolences. There are also moments for prayer and reflection. And there is a time of remembrance where attendees are welcome to share stories or memories of the departed. The emotions throughout the homegoing are very cyclical. Wailing and weeping end with laughter and rejoicing, which solemnity and peace can quickly replace.

Homegoing services end with a processional. Visitors pass by the casket one last time and offer any condolences to family members sitting in the front pews. Once everyone leaves the building, the casket is then led past the crowd of mourners. There are many variations on how the procession unfolds. A horse and buggy carrying the casket down the street. A hearse followed by a line of mourners driving or walking. A crowd singing and dancing to the gravesite.

The scale of a homegoing is most often correlated to financial means and to the public notoriety of the deceased. In recent years, the most lavish public homegoings were those for legendary rapper DMX and the supreme songstress Aretha Franklin. Both funerals were astronomic feats of jubilance. After DMX, born Earl Simmons, died on April 9, 2021, his funeral procession shut down New York City from Yonkers to Brooklyn as it moved toward the Barclays Center, an indoor arena. A member of the hip-hop collective Ruff Ryders, it was only fitting that a massive monster truck carried DMX’s flaming red casket while hundreds of riders on souped-up motorcycles, dirt bikes, and ATVs followed behind it.

Aretha Franklin died in August 2018, but the effects of her homegoing are still felt today. Franklin had a memorial service at a church days after her death; then her body laid in repose at Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan, where thousands of people paid their respects to the late Queen of Soul. Then over ten days later, her homegoing service was held at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple. About 100 pink Cadillacs—a beatific reference to Franklin’s song “Freeway of Love”—were parked outside the church. The service lasted for over eight hours, and in attendance were former U.S. presidents, civil rights activists, singers, rappers, actors, comedians, and, yes, her family members. Coinciding with the singer’s iconic personality and wishes, the funeral home changed Franklin’s outfit between each public viewing. “She is presented in a way that reflects her life and her legacy,” said Linda Swanson, the executive vice president of Swanson Funeral Home, in an interview with the Detroit Free Press.

All of this can seem like spectacle to an outside viewer, but in truth, this is grandiose love and pageantry—an essential element in homegoings. Pageantry allows mourners to grieve unrestrained. It stands in stark contrast to the leading causes of death for Black Americans: brutality, violence, heart disease, and sickness. It’s an act of giving the dead their metaphorical flowers—acknowledgements and praise. Pageantry is a necessity, especially if the departed were not privileged to receive such unabashed love when they were alive.

Homegoing pageantry looks like mourners arriving at the funeral in luxury vehicles while wearing their best outfits. Hair freshly styled from the salon and fingernails gleaming. When there aren’t suits and dresses, there are T-shirts with photos of the deceased against a background of airbrushed clouds and perhaps a pair of angel wings. Pageantry is hundreds of roses fashioned into a bouquet of concentric hearts proudly displayed next to a casket. Pageantry means coming as you are with the capacity for both grief and revelry.

When I attended my maternal grandfather’s homegoing in 2017, I drove to the cemetery chapel with my parents, great-aunt, and sister in a sleek limousine. A crowd greeted us upon our arrival. There were hairdressers, former coworkers, friends, distant cousins, and folks we’d never seen before, some of whom were kin. Bouquets lined the chapel inside. Ushers in navy suits stood guard in the aisles. It was standing room only, as folks occupied every folding chair and inch of the pews available. It felt as if an entire city were crammed inside to proffer their praises and tears for one man. Everything was as it should be.

In the age of COVID-19, the pageantry of homegoings still exists. In 2021, in lieu of my usual funeral attire—a modest, dark-colored dress, stylish heels, and bangles—I wore sweatpants and a T-shirt as I watched the homegoing for my grandmother, my stepfather’s mother, livestreamed from the other side of the country. Yet, everything was still as it should’ve been. An opulent bouquet adorned my grandmother’s pearl-white casket while other bouquets decorated the sanctuary. Despite the possibility of contagion, people wore masks as they sat close together and sang, clapped, and swayed. The coronavirus couldn’t even keep people from sharing their humorous and occasionally expletive-laden tales about my grandmother.

The times may have changed, but the purpose for homegoings remains the same. When the services start, a pastor will approach the podium, lean down into a microphone, and say some version of “We are gathered here today to celebrate….”

Repasts

Celebrating the dead ends with food. After the church doors have closed and the deceased has been buried, homegoings conclude with a repast. Most commonly known as a reception and sometimes called a “repass,” depending on where you’re from or how your tongue shapes the word, this is when family and friends commune.

Where the repast is held is just as important as the essential pageantry of the homegoing. It could be held at a loved one’s home, such as their back yard or dining room area. Or it could be held in a community center or a church basement, as was the case for my grandfather’s repast. Most notably, a lack of attention to where the repast is located and how it is performed can be a sign of disrespect to the deceased and their loved ones as well as an indication that the person or persons hosting the repast aren’t knowledgeable of the departed or their customs.

The importance of the repast and who hosts it is best explained in an interaction featured in season one, episode two of Queen Sugar. The aptly named episode “Evergreen” centers on the Bordelon siblings (Nola, Charley, and Ralph Angel) mourning their father’s death and planning his homegoing. Later in the episode, Nola sits in the kitchen with a family friend when they’re interrupted by the sounds of a catering service unloading tables and food on their front lawn. There’s an undercurrent of irritation because the company is white, but the largest prick comes from something greater. Nova charges back inside to confront her estranged sister, Charley, who ordered the catering service.

“What the hell is that out there?” Nova demands.

“It’s for the repast,” Charley says.

“You somethin’ else, Charley,” Nova retorts. “You know that?”

“It’s just some drinks, tables, and linens. I thought it would help.”

“Don’t nobody need no fancy-ass linen.”

“Okay. Look. I’m paying for it, so what’s it matter? Just let the servers handle it. They know what they’re doing.”

The conversation devolves as the anger rises, and Nova offers a very poignant truth: “We don’t honor our father by sitting friends and family outside at fancy tables. We don’t honor our father by having strangers serve those grieving. We serve comfort food to those who need comfort, and we do it with our own hands! That’s how a family does a repass.”

During the repast, families share stories and carry the burdens of loss over hot meals that are prepared and served by those closest to them. It’s where the community builds up those left behind, often struggling in their grief. These acts of love are ingrained in the tradition of Black bereavement. They cannot be superficial or bought. People will notice.

Comfort food rooted in Black Southern traditions is often served at a repast. Whether in large aluminum trays or white casserole dishes with blue cornflowers, there will be endless fried chicken and crawfish, mashed potatoes, collard greens, and potato salad. Mountains of warm buttered rolls and a mouthwatering spread of dessert. And all of this will be (and should be) made from scratch. Only the best is served, because anything less than top-tier is an affront, a minor disrespect to the dead and their family. Paying respect means providing the best.

When the repast ends and the refrigerator bulges with leftover food, the living should feel full—not just with food but also with care. Because loving those standing in the wake of death is how we continue to honor and celebrate our dead.

DW McKinney is a writer and editor based in Nevada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, The Normal School, Hobart Pulp, Barrelhouse, and Hippocampus Magazine, among others. She is a nonfiction editor for Shenandoah and editor-at-large for Raising Mothers. Say hello at dwmckinney.com.

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The third time I see the bones is on the day all is lost.

We sit around the big oak table, the other women and I, unsure of ourselves. We lost the war. That’s what the young soldier tells us. He looks miserable and emaciated. There is dirt under his nails and on his ragged clothes, as if he’s been digging his way out of his grave. Unfortunately, he is not from our village. He is no one’s lost son, or brother, not a lover either. He is just a messenger.

Our land does not belong to us any longer. We look at each other like scared animals ready to burrow under the earth. In the midst of it all stands the jar with the pickled bones.

I am the youngest woman in the village, or the oldest girl. I am neither. I am lost like the rest. I observe the bones. I greet them silently, like I would an old friend and, in a way, they greet me back. There are so many of them, some large, others very small. All of them are human. Our ancestor’s bones. They float in alcohol which has taken a reddish tint, like thinned blood.

Grandma Maneevah sits at the head of the table. Her skin seems like oak bark, like part of the old table, full of ridges and gullies. She smokes a pipe, and the scent makes the room smell like church. But we don’t go to church anymore. There is no priest there for us.

Only my grandma, my Nana.

She gives the young man a place to sit and a good sip of whatever spirit we still have. He takes it, thankful. His body barely keeps him upright.

“We stay,” Grandma says at last. Her voice carries around the room like the smoke.

“How can we?” the women ask her. Some of us look at the pitiful soldier. “We have no soldiers. We have no weapons.”

“These are our weapons.” She rests her hand on the jug. The bones swim inside the liquid, dancing to a long-forgotten song.

From the bottom of the well that is my childhood memories, I know that song.

The first time I saw the bones, it was summer, and I was seven years old.

My mother worked in the fields with my father and the others. The harvest had been good, but their faces were sullen and tight. War was coming, they said. They worked all day and sometimes overnight to fill the granaries with seeds.

I didn’t understand then what war meant. My only thought was to steal inside Grandma’s room when everyone was asleep and listen to her stories.

But my grandma had plans of her own. One day, before the sun reached the horizon, she woke me up.

“Raeh,” she said. “We are going on an adventure.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

“What about school?” I asked, my stomach twisted with excitement.

Grandma brought a finger to her lips, and I knew then that this was going to be our secret.

She had a pickax and a shovel in a wooden cart and some bread and cheese for us to eat later. We took the road that led out of the village and to the hills that surrounded us, heading to the old cemetery.

On the way, I whistled children’s songs and kicked stones. I was afraid of cemeteries. Sometimes when I lingered in bed, I tried to imagine how it would feel to be silent and unmoving under the earth forever. It seemed impossible to me.

As if she had sensed my fear, my grandma began singing a song of her own. It was a strange song, a war song. It talked about women warriors who rose like giants in times of need. With flaming eyes, they would chase our enemies, who would scatter like mice on the hillside. Their torsos had the length of cypresses; their legs opened craters in the ground. It was oddly uplifting for a war song, and my grandma sang in a sonorous voice, like the one she used in the church.

It was beautiful.

“Is war beautiful?” I asked. That stopped her dead in her tracks.

Her face twisted in a way I could not explain.

“No,” she said, “it is not. War is the most awful thing. That’s why the songs we make about it are beautiful. To give us hope for the future.”

I hesitated at first, but then I joined in, and the song carried us through the steep paths all the way up to a plateau. The ground was hard as rock. Nobody had ever planted anything but people in this field. The stacked stones marked where the bodies of our ancestors lay.

“This is not a cemetery, it’s a bone garden,” Nana said. “Don’t let the stones fool you. These were added later by priests and nuns who didn’t know any better.” She spat on the hard ground as if the stone were an affront to her and grabbed her pickax. “The dead don’t rest here. They are only waiting.”

She started breaking up the ground with the pickax. The song never left her lips. Every time she dug up a bone, I picked it and put it in our cart, whispering thanks to the dead as she had instructed. When the sun began to set, we had gathered our own seeds from the earth. The bones were gray and dusty, but clean of flesh.

“Raeh.” She turned to me, her forehead dripping with sweat, her breath labored. “These are the bones of those women in our song. One day they will show us the way. Never forget that.”

I nodded. I was not afraid anymore. I was relieved that these women were aboveground now, amongst us. Free.

The young soldier, between sobs, explains about the treaty and the refugees loaded onto carriages headed for the mainland. Us. Soon the enemies will come to claim what’s ours.

Quiet settles on the table, but then my mother stands up. She agrees with the man; hopelessness lines her face. It was early in the war when my father joined the army and never came back. She keeps his last belongings in his pack, unopened.

“Maneevah,” she says to Grandma. “We must leave while we still can. Protect the children.” The last part she says while looking at me.

I clench my fists and bite my tongue. It’s not my time to speak.

I wish for the strength of those women from long ago. I wish for a clear sign or simply the courage to stand up and speak.

With the army defeated, the Eastern borders are defenseless against the enemy’s soldiers.

And they will have to go through us.

In a corner of the room, next to our farming tools, is all the food we have managed to gather. If we are to leave, we must start tonight, so we can have a day’s advantage.

“But where shall we go?” I ask Mother. “We can’t run forever.”

“Raeh, hush.”

Her eyes are full of fear when she looks at me. Maybe I remind her of Father.

“Ealeah, listen to the girl,” my grandma starts.

“They are just bones!” yells Mother.

The second time I saw the bones, the soldiers had come to our village. I was twelve. By then I had seen the terrible face of war, but there were still much more to come. Father had already been lost to the war, but a few men lingered, the ones too old or too young still. It was winter, and food was scarce. The rations were barely enough to feed all of us, but here arrived these soldiers, our soldiers, emaciated and all eyes.

They were just passing though. Their horses had died a long time ago, and the soldiers had eaten them. The officer said they would keep moving east until they reached the border. Not far away from here. They needed help, he said. Anything we could spare was valuable to them.

We gave them what we could, what we could afford and more. My mother covered the men with blankets to warm them up for the brief time they would stay here. Her eyes had sunk too deep inside her face. Hunger and worry did that to people.

I stole glances at the soldiers’ muskets. If they died, I thought, what would happen to their weapons? How far would they be by then? I thought of the warrior women and wondered what they fought with. In my head, I sang Nana’s song.

With their bare hands, they fought. And not even swords could stop their fury.

Don’t bow your head, only dig deeper, soon it will be time to reap.

“Raeh,” Mother called, and I rushed to her side.

“I think I have some alcohol out back. Can you fetch it for me?”

I put on my coat and ran into the warehouse. The food was stored on one side of the room. The tools on the other. I rummaged through the bottles, vases, and crates. I found nothing. A glassy shine caught my eye under a hastily thrown blanket, on the other side of the room. I came closer. These were not bottles. There were a half dozen jars; a dark liquid sloshed inside them. I approached and opened one. The bones were floating white. I dipped my finger inside and tried the liquid. It tasted like alcohol, herbs, and dust.

Suddenly, the door swung open. The officer, along with some soldiers, barged in. I heard my mother’s screams in the distance.

“Move away, little girl,” he croaked. “We need those things.”

The officer approached the jars, and my heart skipped a beat. I looked at his scabbard at the saber nestled inside it. I tensed. My hand was so close, I was sure I could snatch it fast. But then? Then what?

That’s when he turned around and said, “Leave those. They are only bones.”

He didn’t try to hide the disgust on his face. But at least the bones would stay.

The soldiers took everything from our warehouse that night. All the supplies they could carry with them. They took the last of the fighting men too. We never saw them again.

The weakest among us died of hunger. It was a cold and dark winter.

The young soldier has fallen silent. He has closed his eyes, exhausted, trying to shake off one nightmare with another.

The women talk in the half-light of the candles. I listen. I listen as the bones dance around the alcohol. I can taste their tanginess on my tongue; I feel their crispiness under the weight of my teeth.

Until I can’t listen anymore.

I stand up and reach for the jug. Everybody stops and looks at me, their faces waxen under the yellow light. I unscrew the lid and reach my skinny hand deep inside. The bones welcome my touch, whisper to me of old battles. I choose a small bone, because that’s how they see me. The stapes, an ear bone, so that they will listen to me. I toss it in my mouth.

“Raeh!” My mother tries to stop me. But my grandma nods in approval.

“They chose her,” Nana says. “She will guide us now.”

I stare at my mother’s eyes as I close my mouth, envelop the bone. It is hard only on the surface. It yields under the strength of my jaws and dissolves in my mouth. It tastes like dust. It connects with something buried deep inside, guiding me. I take the scythe that rests against the wall.

“We fight,” I say firmly.

The women stand up, and for a moment I fear their scorn, their disapproval. But then every woman takes a bone. To Nana I give a cranial bone. She is the head of this village. For my mother I leave a sharp rib, because she, like them, protects us.

We silently feast on our ancestors; we feast on their courage, and by morning we are changed. We are transformed into giants. We are warriors with hammers and pickaxes, with rakes and scythes. Even with just our bare hands.

We take to the woods and the plains, and when the enemies come, we are ready. We are tall and strong like cypresses, the planes echo with our cries of war. And those who we fight call us monsters and call us gods. But we are neither. We are only the children of our ancestors.

Many of us perish, but we win the fight. We chase them away.

I listen to the remaining soldiers’ cries fading in the distance. I hope they stay away, or else our sacrifice was for nothing.

My mother is among the dead.

She was cornered by a group of soldiers behind a cluster of trees before I could reach her. When she was about to fall, she screamed with all the air left in her bullet-riddled lungs and took as many with her as her towering body could reach. And then it was too late to do anything.

All around, women and children grieve for the loss of their own, and some of them even dare to hope.

I grieve for them and for myself.

My mother’s body is at my feet, but not the warrior she was moments ago. She is changed again. She is the small woman she always was. I look at my own body. I have the limbs of a girl again, barely an adult. I never felt the change back to my old self, and I start wondering if it was all a dream born out of our own desperation. Or perhaps the alcohol in that jar did something to our minds. But the broken bodies of our enemies speak for themselves.

I feel Nana’s hand on my shoulder, warm and bloodstained, but not by her own blood.

“Raeh, it is time to sow,” my grandmother’s voice shakes me, even though it’s barely a whisper. I know she is grieving, too. My mother was her last living child. Now she will be our seed for the future. A seed in our bone garden.

I bend down and grab my mother’s feet while Nana grabs the shoulders. A boy with a bruised face runs to us and offers his help. We let him help us. Someone behind me murmurs a part of the old war song.

This is the time for the sowing, there will come a time to reap.

The old warriors will rise again, with the harvest of their bones.

Where the ghosts hover now, giants will take up arms.

Don’t bow your head, only dig deeper, soon it will be time to reap.

We bury them in the battlefield beside the woods. Away from the old place and the stones of the priests. The ground is ripe with blood and sweat, the soil upturned from the weight of our gigantic footsteps.

And then we wait. We wait for more soldiers to come, and when they don’t, we rebuild our lives and we work. Some of us leave the village, new people come. We die and we have children. All the while, the soil gets hard again. And later, new priests come to the unmarked graves and raise stones.

The first time I see the bones of my old comrades, I am as old as time. The season is turning again. There are rumors of conflicts, flames burning all around us, ready to join into a fire. Like my long-gone Nana, I have come prepared.

My grandchildren flock around me, looking, waiting. They have brought pickaxes and shovels, or just their bare hands.

“That’s not a cemetery. It’s our bone garden, ripe and ready,” I tell them.

My vision fills with the flickering spirits of giants, hovering over the fruits of our resistance. I take their little hands in mine and start a song. “Time to harvest.”

Eugenia Triantafyllou is a Greek author and artist with a flair for dark things. Her work has been nominated for the Ignyte, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and she is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find her stories in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex and other venues. She currently lives in Athens with a boy and a dog. Find her on Twitter @foxesandroses or her website https://eugeniatriantafyllou.wordpress.com

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In fields corn is blooming, embers burning, gilded sea of spun glass. My father points out
            the car window
to rattle off a folktale or maybe urban legend about haunted crops, vengeful farmers,
            and our own relatives
who came over to find nothing after leaving nothing. The radio cuts out. The Midwest sits
            between transmission zones,
memory and fantasy. Once we drove past these same fields, Mr. Kapinski’s farm.
            Dead center
stood a figure, alight in tangerine flames. I did not know if the figure was human
            or otherwise
and my father once again pointed out the window to assure me it was nothing but a sight
            to be held,
that I should neither fear fire nor endings, that death—and loss—can be luminous.

Morgan L. Ventura (they/she) is a writer, twice-Rhysling nominated poet, and ex-archaeologist. Based between Ireland and Mexico, Morgan’s currently PI and curator of a digital repatriation project commissioned by the University of Exeter’s Imagining Futures Through Un/Archived Pasts initiative. Their short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lackington’s, Strange Horizons, and Augur, among others, while essays appear in Best Canadian Essays 2021 and Geist. You can find Morgan on Twitter @hmorganvl.

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