Postmortem (Part 1)

Stories of the City #1 - How do others view you? How do you view yourself?

Reading time: approximately 10 minutes

Hello my darlings! 💖 Welcome back to the City. This story takes place about 75 years after the creation of the Ossuary.

If you missed my introduction to the City, you can read it here.

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“It’s been four hours, Netty,” Gerrald says. “Have you ever known any surgery that’s taken four hours?”

I look over at Gerrald and shrug. I haven’t heard of anyone being in a health station that long, but there’s no need to say that, is there?

The Medical area of the Under Commons is clearly mer in design. The soft sea greens and blues painted on the fabricated waves that loop around the walls of the small family waiting room are soothing. The room itself curves gently, not a harsh corner on the walls or the furniture. I rub my arms, feeling cold. It’s my liz genes. I’m not cool-blooded like a full liz, but I get chilled easily in the mer sections of the Ossuary. A comfortable temperature for a mer, with their metabolism adapted to ward off hypothermia in flood waters, is far below normal for a heat-tolerant liz.

I walk around the room, trying to warm up, trying not to think. I touch the fabricated waves, but the lightly textured feel isn’t enough to distract me.

Gerrald stands as I walk behind the couch he was sitting on. He reaches out to me and I hesitate. Seeking comfort from Gerrald feels wrong without Sylvie. It’s always been us and him.

But the lost, hurting look on his face matches how I feel. I’m not the only one who needs comfort. I move around the couch and let him take me in his arms. He is a seven-foot tall wall of muscle, a near-perfect specimen of alb with his ghost-white skin and thin, silky white hair. I return his gentle hug and he slumps a bit against me.

Oh, Sylvie, I think. You have to be okay. I can’t be the one to bear him up and stay standing myself.

“She’s strong,” Gerrald says, his deep voice warm by my ear. He can’t say anymore that she’ll make it.

“She is,” I reply, because I can’t say she’ll make it anymore either. Not after four hours. But she always has been strong. Stronger than Gerrald or I.

I look up as the door to the waiting room slides open. It’s Mayve, and the solemn curve of her mouth, the apology in her eyes, are all I need to know. I feel Gerrald’s arms tighten around me until my ribs ache, but that’s okay because I can barely breathe anyway. Mayve is talking. Her words don’t make any sense. Nothing makes any sense.

Sylvie is gone.

---

Mayve leaves. I don’t know how long she is away. Gerrald stops crushing my ribs eventually. He leaves me standing there and I stare at those blue and green wave forms on the wall. Like Mayve’s words didn’t make any sense, neither does blue, or green, or a fake wave. I don’t understand. I feel untethered, my context ripped away, my life gone. For a moment, I wonder if I’m the one who died.

Mayve comes back in and slides the door closed behind her. She’s carrying a pad in the crook of her arm. Pads are exclusively for adding entries into the City records, very official, very rare. The sight of one shakes something loose in me, brings back a tiny piece of context. I have to be official now too, I have to handle things. I feel like a thick fog descends over my brain, numbing everything but my focus on the here and now. Mayve walks by us past the couches and comfy chairs in the seating section of the waiting room to a round wooden table. I get up and go stand across from her, and Gerrald follows me, standing between us.

“I’m sorry,” Mayve says. “But the sooner we get this out of the way, the easier for everyone.”

“I know,” I reply. Mayve is a Tradition Keeper. She performs ceremonies and tells the stories of the Four Nations and Ossuary cultures. For births and deaths she’s also been invested by the City to upkeep the records. Mayve puts the pad down facing me, and I put my thumb on document after document that she’s called up. Mayve and Gerrald do too, as some call for witnesses. Mostly I’m confirming the facts of Sylvie’s life for demographic data. The City doesn’t seem to care much about what we do in the Ossuary until we die.

The last document is her death certificate. I keep swallowing as I press my thumb to the pad. The fog in my head is so thick I can barely feel my body, sensations of nausea and panic echoing faintly, too far away to touch me.

“We’re done,” Mayve says. “That’s all the official business over.” We all stand there, lost in our own worlds, until Mayve shifts uncomfortably, settling her woven shawl squarely on her shoulders.

“What is it, Mayve?” Gerrald asks. He’s always the courteous one, our Gerrald. Always trying to put everyone at ease. That used to delight me. I forget why now.

“Would you like me to officiate her ceremony?” Her voice is breathy and hesitant.

I look over at Gerrald. It’s fine with me. Mayve grew up with Sylvie and I, and while she isn’t a close friend, she is a friend. Gerrald nods, so I say, “Sure. Yes. We’d be honored.” The faint nausea returns.

Mayve smiles. “Thank you. I’ll prepare a mer ceremony. Would you like—”

“No,” I say.

“Netty,” Gerrald says quickly.

“No.” My nausea fades. “No. She’ll have a hybrid service.”

Mayve looks so shocked, you’d think I suggested leaving her out to rot. “Hybrid? But Sylvie always participated with us in mer holidays and celebrations.”

“And hybrid ones,” I point out.

Mayve makes a waving motion with her hand, pushing my words aside. “Well, yes, of course. We all do. But that’s not who she was.”

“Don’t you think I know who she was?” I should be mad, but I’m not. Not yet. I can feel it though, the anger waiting for the fog to lift. The fog that keeps me able to stick up for Sylvie, even when she’s…not here.

“Netty,” Mayve says. She sounds calm and soft and soothing. She thinks I can’t tell she’s putting a touch of siren song in her voice, as if Sylvie and I haven’t been together for almost 15 years. “I know you think you’re doing what is best. But are you doing what you think she wanted or what you want?”

Something in my chest crumples. It’s got to be my heart, collapsing like a burnt-out star under the weight of this day. I stare at her. Mayve’s warm brown skin and curly hair look typically yuld, but she was born in the mer section of the City. Her mer mother had dropped her off down here in the Ossuary as an infant.

I fight back against the soothing peace her song tries to wrap me in, because there is no compromise in me. Not about this. I look Mayve in the eyes and say: “How can you still love the people who threw you away?”

Her face pales and she breathes out hard. Gerrald moves around to Mayve’s side of the table. He stands behind her, his ghost-white hands on her upper arms. I feel the effects of her song fade and my fog of unfeeling descends again.

Gerrald gives me a disgusted look. I don’t care. Mayve leans back into Gerrald’s solid  alb frame. I don’t care about that, either. I knew Gerrald would side against me. There’s silence except for Mayve’s deep breaths. I can see she’s fighting to keep her face neutral, to stay professional.

“Sylvie will have a hybrid service,” I say.

“But—” Gerrald starts.

“No,” I say. Again. I’ll keep saying it until someone starts listening.

Gerrald takes his hands from Mayve’s upper arms and steps out from behind her. But Mayve steps forward to the edge of the table, reaching a hand back to stop Gerrald. Gerrald’s white alb skin is pink with anger, but he manages to swallow whatever he was about to say.

Mayve draws herself up, and I can see the shift in her from Sylvie’s friend to Tradition Keeper. “We honor the traditions we come from. It has nothing to do with the people who follow them now. We each have our own histories running in our veins, and we have ties to those who came before us that cannot be undone.”

“Those traditions shaped our families into people who abandon their children,” I say. It’s taking everything I have not to give in to the tremors running under my skin that threaten to make me shake like a leaf. I still don’t feel my anger, but I know that sometime in the future this conversation will come back to me like a knife to my guts. “How can you say it’s not about people? People make traditions. The people who have loved Sylvie for her whole life are down here in the Ossuary, and we have our own traditions to honor those we love.”

“Not her whole life. You know she came late to the Ossuary, Netty. You know she thought of herself as mer.” Gerrald’s whole body begs for my understanding, from his pleading eyes to the way he leans toward me to the tone of his voice.

“I know you thought of her as mer,” I reply. “That’s not good enough.”

“She was mer,” Mayve says. “She had mer-blue skin, and mer-black hair. She had gills, Netty. She could siren song with her beautiful mer voice. She deserves to be reunited with her ancestors in the sea.” Her ancestors, who lived along the coast and modified their genes to adapt to the endless flooding that sea rise brought. Who dictated what are “acceptable genetic parameters” and what aren’t.

“Her hair was alb-thin. She hated her skin, because she thought it wasn’t blue enough. She didn’t have webbing on her fingers or toes. It’s you who wants that reunion, Mayve. And if it’s what you want and I’m alive when you die I will steal your body from the altar and carry it to the river myself if that’s what it takes.”

I look from her to Gerrald. I can feel the fog between me and my emotions shredding, feel a wave of grief rushing in. I’m not ready to feel yet. I watch Gerrald blink his all-black liz eyes. I’m not ready. I can’t put off the trembling anymore. “And if I somehow outlive you I will light your alb pyre in the middle of the Under Commons and burn every last tree and flower there to the ground if I have to.” My voice is shaking. I wonder if I’m going to collapse. I grip the chair in front of me as hard as I can. I have to make this right for Sylvie.

Mayve’s mer-blue irises look crystalline as her eyes well up. She shakes her head and wipes the tears away. She looks over at Gerrald, who is no longer standing tall with tension. He looks collapsed in on himself, shoulders caved in, chest hollow. He’s holding his arms around his middle. He gives Mayve a little shrug, then nods.

That’s it then.

There’s a knock on the door and Orin, the healer who pronounced Sylvie dead, steps in. “I’m sorry,” he says, looking back and forth at us standing across the table from each other. “I’m interrupting.” Orin is covered in small iridescent green scales like any liz, but his eyes are yuld green and he has pure yuld curly blond hair instead of the typical bald, scaled liz scalp.

“We’re done here,” Mayve says. I feel my fingers release their death grip on the chair back. I’ve won. Now I just need to keep it together long enough to get home. Away from everyone.

“Oh, that’s good,” Orin says. “I just—I got the final report from the health station. If you want it.”

“Didn’t you say it was a heart attack?” Gerrald asks.

“Well, yes. But the full report says why.”

Why one second she was walking beside me and the next she was collapsed on the floor. Why her heart gave out when she was only thirty-three.

“Tell us,” I say.

“She had a common genetic variant that often presents in alb females. It wasn’t screened for, so it wasn’t caught. But I’ve reprogrammed the health stations…”

Orin trails off as I walk by him and out the door.

A common genetic variant rings through my head over and over as I go through the Under Commons to our room—my room—in the yuld section of the Ossuary. People call out to me. I keep walking. I have nothing for them today.

I know what I need to do.

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Revising this took longer than expected—both in time and length. I’ll post the second part of this story next week. I hope you liked it! If you are enjoying your time in the City and would like to go on to the next story, click here to read Postmortem, Part 2. 💖