1
The Old Woman and the Corpse
Esther and Gloria had a routine.
Every day at 1:12 p.m., the elderly neighbors would shuffle to their mailboxes-Esther on one side of the gravel road, Gloria on the other-and they'd wave to each other. The widows owned the only two houses on a rural, one-mile stretch of road on Clifford Island. Their properties had been cut into the forest a half century ago, their homes engulfed by pine trees, with hidden driveways peeking through thin gaps in the sweet and earthy-smelling woods. Not many cars went that way; some days it was only the mail truck. The fog was a bit heavier at this particular spot, and despite the lack of island traffic, more deer seemed to dart out and get obliterated there than any other place on the island. The stench of rotting flesh lingered for days. Something to remind the women that death could sneak up at any moment.
They were a superstitious pair, after all.
The women's routine went like this: Esther walked down her driveway wearing blue slippers, gray cotton pants, and a red cardigan. She reached her mailbox and raised her right hand to Gloria, who would be wearing a faded white nightgown. Gloria waved back. The women checked for mail and then doddered back up their driveways.
It went like that every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow, for twenty-five years.
Many days there was no mail delivered. Christmas, the Fourth of July, Sundays, of course. But sometimes there was just no mail. No letters, no bills, no JCPenney catalog. The mail truck drove right by, or simply didn't come at all. The women checked their mailboxes anyway, always at 1:12 p.m. If it was colder outside-and it certainly got very cold this far north, especially in the clutches of a Wisconsin winter-Esther and Gloria bundled up in jackets and mittens. But Esther always wore the gray pants and cardigan underneath, and Gloria always wore the nightgown. It was tradition.
The two women lived alone for decades, but they were far from bored. Esther played cribbage at the small community center on Thursday nights. Both women sang in the church choir on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Gloria enjoyed tending to her garden; Esther had a chicken coop. They often exchanged pleasantries at the café downtown, usually commiserating about the runny eggs and burnt coffee. Esther and Gloria were friendly, but they weren't friends. Some islanders wondered why they weren't friends, as if being old and alone meant you had to be friends with your neighbor, who was also old and alone. They'd even get asked that question from time to time. Why don't you drive together to church? You live across the street. But both women felt that they couldn't be friends. They knew their bond ran deeper than friendship.
The 1:12 ceremony was their purpose. It started one afternoon, and then they found that they needed to do it every day. The routine was all they needed and all they wanted from each other, and both women would be damned if they'd be the one to break the streak. It gave a sense of structure to their lives, a sense of balance to their little corner of the universe. It made Esther and Gloria feel that the things they did mattered, that someone else depended on them. No one else had depended on them for a really long time.
Check time. Open door. Walk down driveway. Wave. Open mailbox. Walk up driveway.
Every day.
Twenty-five years.
But then, one unseasonably warm October afternoon, Gloria wasn't at her mailbox. The moment Esther stepped outside her front door, she knew something was wrong. The world felt different, and she couldn't explain it. Esther walked past her mailbox, across the road, and up Gloria's driveway. She hadn't been to Gloria's house in years, and she felt like she was trespassing. Her chest tightened, and her pace quickened. She knew she had to do this, and she wanted to get it over with quickly.
The front door was unlocked. Esther clasped the handle and gave the door a gentle push, thinking how strange it was to open a front door that wasn't her own. The weight, the squeak. It felt so utterly foreign to her.
"Gloria?" Esther called out. Nothing. She felt the dread spread throughout her belly. She had a feeling about what she was about to find, and she just hoped it wasn't gruesome and that it wouldn't cause her to heave her small lunch of an English muffin and cottage cheese onto Gloria's floor. Esther rounded the corner into the living room, and there it was: Gloria's body slumped in a brown recliner.
"Oh, Gloria," Esther whispered.
Gloria was dead. Esther knew that immediately, and her first thought was relief-it was not a gruesome sight at all, and her lunch stayed put right where she'd left it. There was no putrid smell, no blood, and the body wasn't bent or twisted in any unholy directions. Gloria's right arm dangled off the armrest, and her mouth hung open. Esther had found her husband's dead body in much the same position many decades ago, and she had known immediately then, too. Gloria, like Esther's late husband, appeared to have died of natural causes. A heart attack, maybe a stroke. Or perhaps her body just finally gave up while taking a nap-Esther hoped that was the case. Something totally painless and without fear.
We all deserve to go that way, Esther thought.
Esther kept right on staring at Gloria's dead body, waiting for something to happen. She didn't know exactly what that something would be, but she waited all the same. The dead woman stayed right where she was, sunk into the recliner, properly dressed in that white nightgown-the one she wore to check the mail every day. Esther had never seen it this closely before. It had been patched up dozens of times. Little pieces of stitching jutted out here and there, and the bottom six inches had more wear and tear, no doubt the result of countless days trudging to the mailbox in snow or mud. Esther was surprised the nightgown had lasted this long.
She looked around the room. The furniture was dated and worn, just like her own. Just another solitary old bird like me, Esther thought. She caught her reflection in the rectangular, chunky Zenith TV that sat in the corner. It made her look older and tinier than she was, and for a moment she pondered the idea of mortality and wondered if her own date had already been circled on Death's calendar and she just didn't realize it yet. A large grandfather clock ticked loudly. Esther read the clockface: 1:19 p.m.
Reality crashed in. They weren't supposed to be here. Gloria wasn't supposed to be dead. The two women were supposed to be outside, puttering down their driveways in their daily uniforms, checking their mail. Actually, that was supposed to have happened seven minutes ago.
They were seven minutes late.
They were breaking their routine.
The old woman's body stiffened with panic. Esther didn't know what to do. All she knew was that their routine was all they had. Actually, there was no they anymore. It was she, and only she. It was the first time she'd been truly alone in, how long was it now, almost thirty years? The exact amount of time didn't matter. In that moment, the only thing that mattered anymore was the mail routine. Her purpose, their shared purpose, the one Esther shared with the dead person in the living room.
She had nothing else but the routine, so she had to act quickly.
The old woman gripped Gloria by the wrist and then dropped it immediately, recoiling at the body's coldness. It had caught her off guard. She had picked up a dead cat once before, and it felt nothing like this. Steeling herself, Esther reached forward and gripped the wrist again, this time dragging Gloria's corpse off the easy chair. The body fell limply to the shag carpet. Gloria's open eyes pointed blankly toward the ceiling, and Esther had a passing, terrible thought that those dead eyes might snap sideways and seize upon her-Oh, you thought I was dead, missy? I'll show you dead-but Gloria's body stayed very much lifeless, her eyes trained on absolutely nothing at all. Esther gripped Gloria by the right ankle and started pulling. It was slow, painful work. Gloria couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds, but Esther wasn't much bigger herself. She hauled the body inch by inch to the front door, and when she reached the foyer, Esther dropped Gloria's leg to the floor. The dead woman's foot thumped on the linoleum. Esther put her hands on her knees, her ancient lungs pounding, her pulse racing.
She couldn't drag her any farther. Esther needed another way.
She found a wheelbarrow next to the garage, steered it awkwardly to the front door, and, even though she was sure she'd never lifted anything so heavy in her entire life, heaved the frail body inside. As Esther guided the rickety wheelbarrow down the driveway, there were a few times where it almost rammed into a tree trunk or tipped over. She was certain if it tipped, that would be it. She'd used up all the energy she had, played her trump card, and the corpse would just remain on the gravel driveway until she could convince someone else to help her with her morbid task. But Esther's steering was sound, the wheelbarrow level and true, and she made it all the way to the end of the driveway right next to the white mailbox with the red flag, one of the sacred locations of the women's routine. Her arms were wobbly by this point, and she couldn't have made it much farther. She released the wooden handles and the wheelbarrow tipped over, Gloria's body sliding onto the road like a pile of dirt.
Esther gathered her strength, and she looked up and down the road. No cars in sight, and she didn't hear any in the distance, which wasn't an odd thing in the slightest. Anyone driving in her neck of the woods was always a surprise to her anyway. She looked down at her wrist to check the time, but her gold watch with the champagne dial-the one gifted to her by her late husband, seemingly a lifetime ago-wasn't there. It wasn't part of the mail-checking ensemble. Regardless, she knew she was woefully behind.
If I'm an hour late, will it still count? she thought. What about two hours? Three hours?
She looked across the road toward her own house, thinking it looked quite different from this angle, like she was looking at it through Gloria's eyes for the first time. But there was no time for nostalgia or taking a moment to truly appreciate the world from someone else's perspective. She needed something to tie and fasten the body, and she needed it quickly. Her heart pounding, she briskly walked back to her own place, retrieved her husband's old belts and some zip ties, and then went back to the corpse and got to work.
Did she wave with her right hand or her left hand? Esther wondered. She couldn't believe that she couldn't remember such a simple detail, and she blamed it on the adrenaline. Esther settled on Gloria reaching inside the mailbox with her right hand and waving with her left, so that's how she propped up the body. It took six belts and three zip ties, and in the end, it didn't look convincing at all. To make it all work, she had to shove half of Gloria's arm inside the mailbox, and her body then swung out awkwardly with the other arm above her head and zip-tied to the wooden post. It didn't resemble someone checking their mail. It looked exactly like what it was: a dead body clumsily tied to a mailbox.
Satisfied, Esther walked back to her house and went inside. She looked at her clock: 2:22 p.m. They'd missed their routine by more than an hour, but Esther decided that was okay. The fact that she was doing it at all was what mattered. She tried not to think about what would happen the next day or the day after that. She'd come up with something, she reasoned. Something to keep it all going, something to keep the trains running on time. For now, she had to hold up her end of the bargain.
Esther opened the front door and, trembling only a little, strolled as casually as she could down her driveway through the pinewoods. She got to her mailbox and raised her right hand to Gloria, who, of course, was dead and tethered to her own mailbox. Esther popped open the little black door and reached inside. No mail today. The old woman closed the door and turned to walk away, the ritual complete, all right with the world. But then she hesitated.
She looked back at the corpse. Her dead neighbor hadn't moved an inch, thankfully. But that wasn't what Esther was thinking about. She was thinking about that nightgown, about what would happen to it after all this madness.
It was old, sure. Just like her and Gloria.
But it had a few good years left in it.
Maybe more.
Especially if Esther fixed it up.
This might be Gloria's last time checking for mail, Esther thought, but that doesn't mean the nightgown can't still be a part of the routine.
I won't let anyone take that away from me.
Esther hustled up her driveway to grab a pair of scissors from her sewing kit.
There was one more thing that needed to be done.
#
Larry Chambers, a carpenter in town, spotted the body a few hours later. He didn’t usually drive out that way, but he had just gotten his 1991 Dodge Ram jumped, and he remembered reading that you should drive your car around for twenty minutes after a jump to juice up the battery. So, Larry decided to drive aimlessly around the island for a while, and that’s how he found himself in Gloria and Esther’s neck of the woods on an autumn afternoon.
From a distance, he thought it was a person stretching. He got a little closer, and he thought it was a scarecrow. Then Larry slammed on the brakes, and the beer bottles he'd drained that morning rolled and clanged together on the passenger-side floor of his truck. He adjusted his rearview mirror and looked at the body again, just to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.
The man turned off his car and sat in silence for a few moments, his gaze not leaving what he had now determined to be a fresh corpse, strung up like a marionette.
Copyright © 2023 by Jimmy Juliano. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
