My grandmother slaps the wheel of her Santa Fe and starts to cry. She cannot reverse from the depressions of Dairy Queen’s dirt parking lot. “You need this job,” she says. “This is all a terrible omen, I’m sure of it. It’s the melanoma, don’t you know?”

The guy interviewing me, Matt, helps push my grandmother out from where her tire has ground a deeper depression in the mud, calling her ma’am before he’s calling me bro after I shake his hand. His hands are velvety and small. He has tried enlarging them with an Ed Hardy style dragon on his forearm. The interview is in a back office that stinks like old Maxwell House tinged with new Right Guard. Matt begins by bragging about owning the funeral home across the street as well as an office building a few blocks away from here. He says commercial real estate is airtight. On a computer monitor plastered in GEICO sticky notes, he taps through my resume, murmuring little sounds of approval.

“You went to high school at Oxnard East? What year? Oh, you’re probably way before me,” he says. For a second it feels like he might start some long story about a football career being cut short by an injury. 

“Can you start next Saturday?” I tell him yes and then he shows me the walk-in, chest, and blast freezers. Through the American flag painted on the front window for Independence Day, we pause to admire the smoke that pours out from the funeral home across the street. A stately Victorian with a trailer mashed into its side. Former cadavers eat the sunset. Bronze reflects across the water pooled in each pothole. Matt makes a moaning sound as the smoke turns black. A lady walking her dog stops to take a picture of it on her phone. 

Matt says, “Most people are weird about that smoke. I can tell you’re not a sheep. Not like everyone out there in the world. This place in here? This is ours. I could use someone like you in upper management.”

“I mean, you got to roast them up somewhere,” I laugh, pretending like everyone doesn’t know it’s the only crematorium in Massachusetts that would process the guy who committed the Stone Row Outlets massacre a couple years ago. Matt is sniffing something in the freezer. 

“How’s that?” he asks. I tell him I won’t let him down.


2.

Our DQ’s main rule: the front marquee sign’s letters must be switched out by Paloma, who is the only person above eighteen, aside from Matt. He’s too busy with his real estate to slide letters around. Paloma keeps a plastic knife behind her ear. She uses the knife to pry open the register drawer when it sticks. Her French braids are wiry with premature gray. She is the only one who can use the fryolator and as such, her face always has a perfect sheen to it. I’m almost positive even though her boyfriend owns a gun, that once I’m eighteen we’ll be married with kids born with gray hair and red knives behind their ears. Paloma uses a large harpoon-like spear to arrange the marquee’s letters. We only have sixteen and she must shift them into new anagrams every week. Our name tags are recycled from past employees. The name I wear is Brett. Paloma tells me the real Brett quit last summer to serve in Afghanistan. Sometimes drunk dads, their hands dropping melted brown soft serve will yell Brett, can I get some napkins. Brett, the napkins. I tell Paloma that my grandmother thinks her moles are infected with the spirit of her own grandmother. Because she never got along with her grandmother, she believes the moles are malignant. Paloma asks if malignant is the good one.

On Labor Day in front of a line of families waiting for their ice cream, the crematorium is raided by the cops. When Channel 8 News pulls up, people start taking videos on their phones. Channel 3 arrives soon after. One cop wearing chrome Oakley’s poses in front of a filing cabinet dumped upside down in Matt’s former parking space. Later, I pass a Butterfinger Blizzard to a guy who looks startlingly similar to the cop except now his Oakley's are indenting his forehead. “Holy crap, the whole cavalry’s here,” he says. Matt had been caught doubling up on bodies in their oven, returning mixed ashes to the families. Channel 8 reports that Matt was wearing the Stone Row Outlet shooter’s digital watch when he was arrested. The photo they use of Matt is him from college. He’s tan and muscular. His arm is draped around a girl whose face is blurred. I imagine Matt was on Spring Break then. Somewhere tropical with clear, turquoise waters. 


3.

As our new manager, Paloma reaches into the nametag bucket to become Casey. Our schedules align like celestial bodies. 

Casey tells me how she dreams in summer blockbusters. At night she is inhabited by Marvel heroes, pirates, and soundless CGI explosions that bloom behind her eyelids. 

She has a recurring dream about Jurassic Dark, a gritty reboot where the animatronic dinosaurs used in the original Jurassic Park come alive themselves and wreak havoc on downtown Los Angeles. Casey says that in her dream, the dinosaurs are enchanted by the spell of a cave witch played by Julianne Moore.

Through the quiet autumn, we’re alone with only the freezer hum and the occasional customer. I watch as people in parkas grimace at the sanitizer spray from the milkshake beaters. Casey tells me, “I see the triceratops herd get struck by lightning outside of the mall I hung out at when I was a kid. As they’re set ablaze, I can clearly see how all the metal tendons and wiring works beneath their rubber frames. I always wake up here. Right as the triceratops herd is lumbering, fully engulfed by flames, into the food court. Do you think that’s some kind of omen? Like we’re not going to make it?” 


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