Angela, in the basement by Kelly McElroy

The first time my mother takes my oldest sister down into the embalming room, I am hidden away upstairs, staring at my ceiling. My sister has just returned home from getting her degree in mortuary science, so she has a depth of understanding about lifeless bodies that I can’t begin to comprehend. It is almost like the first time she had sex, when she came home and told me in a whisper that she had lost her virginity to her boyfriend. It feels the same now, like there’s a fog between us, but on the other side is an unreachable knowledge of death.

My parents refused to let her go downstairs until she completed her degree. That was the rule: No kids in the embalming room, ever. I suppose she is an adult now. She has earned her right to watch our mother work, gloved hands over stiff skin, pinching injections into nerve endings that cannot feel a thing.

We live up on the second floor of the funeral home. Growing up, we did our homework sometimes in the empty viewing room while my father worked in the office so he could keep an eye on us through the crack in the door frame. And all the while my mother was in the basement, dressing dead bodies and then coming upstairs to make us dinner. The hands that rubbed our backs as we fell asleep were the same hands that massaged cold skin to ensure that embalming chemicals flowed evenly through muscles.

My sister used to beg to go downstairs with her. She just wanted to watch, she’d say, but my mother never gave in. No one was allowed anywhere near that door until they earned it.

Now I lie on my bed, two floors above where my mother and sister work. I am on top of the covers when my father knocks and slowly pushes the door open.

“You okay?” he asks gently from the doorway.

I shrug, shoulders moving against the quilt beneath me. “I barely knew her.”

“Still,” he says. “It’s not natural to lose a classmate. Or to be forced to deal with death at your age.”

I don’t remind him that death lives below me and snakes up through the air vents and lingers on my mother’s hands when she braids my hair before cheer practice. That death will be washed down the drain in my bathroom in a few hours when my sister comes upstairs to shower. Instead I turn my head so I’m no longer looking at my popcorn ceiling, but out across the yard in the direction of my high school.

Yesterday, as we sat waiting at our desks, my homeroom teacher came into the room and told us that Angela Sung was dead. It was true that I barely knew Angela, but it was also true that she’d had the locker next to mine. We rarely ever spoke, but every morning I saw the decorations inside her locker door, saw her check her hair in the mirror that hung there, watched as two of her friends arrived like clockwork at 7:36 each morning to walk with her to class.

Mr. Howard never said it, but everyone knew Angela had killed herself. It was the vague way he spoke about the death, combined with everything we knew about Angela already, combined with the resources and hotlines he reminded us about. Then he dismissed us, telling us our absences would be excused in all our classes if we needed time to grieve on our own, or if we wanted to talk to the grief counselors waiting in the main office. Most of my classmates left. I stayed until the school day was over, and by the time I got home, Angela was already in my basement.

My father places a cup of tea and a tootsie roll on my bedside table. It’s from a bowl that sits on his desk downstairs, for mourners to chew on while he lays out funeral details.

“Yell if you need anything,” he says, but I will not.

I hear him plodding down the steps, getting ready to call Angela’s parents and list the expenses of the service they’re planning for this weekend. One floor below that, my sister helps my mother manipulate Angela’s skin through latex gloves. They glue her lips shut into a pleasant smile. They paint a clear polish onto her nails. I wonder if they might let me into the room, just for a minute, to tell them that Angela, too, likes her hair best in one long braid.

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KELLY McELROY — Kelly is a fiction writer from New Jersey. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Bowling Green State University.

Art by BECKS SIMPSON — By day, Becks is just some tech chick, doin’ nerdy software stuff, but by night, she does all the creative things as the Antipode Artist (painter, emerging writer, illustrator, occasional tattooer, musician, singer songwriter, doer of all the arty things).