Authors: SUNSHINE O'DONNELL
This is the trick, Mem knows, the hard part, not the crying but the stopping. The abrupt putting away of things. Folding and repacking the secrets like her dead son’s clothes. Closing up her face so that it is white and still as an undisturbed snow. Aurora is able to do it each day, she knows her waters will make their way, plummeting through faucets and wells and the stiff veins of plants.
Mem gets down onto her knees to look at her salt plants and sees a few flecks of mica glinting in the dirt. But there is nothing else. No smooth white leaves or blazing branches. No crystalline saplings with moon-colored fruits.
Just dirt.
Just rocks.
And lots and lots of holes.
That afternoon Mem and her mother work a funeral in a small cemetery not far from their house. Across the street from the plot, workers are demolishing a commercial building that has been, through the years, a deli, a shoe store, a pet shop, a bar, each expensively renovated before opening and each failing within a year. The rubble falls with a soft thundering noise but doesn’t distract Mem from her job. She keeps picturing the empty holes in the backyard, the hole where her own mother’s casket will someday be buried, the stack of luggage piled at the front door.
Mem without her mother
.
Before it is even time to start, Mem’s mouth is open and wailing. The real mourners, the priest, and the daughter of the deceased all crane their necks slightly so that they can hear her performance over the powdery thwacks and grinds coming from the other side of the street.
Behind her, Mem’s mother begins to weep, too, but Mem barely hears it. The holes she pictures in her mind are growing, her mother’s corpse fading inside the holes, the no-thingness of the holes, the nothing where
there once was something, scoops of nothingness defined only by the somethingness around it. You can only tell that a hole is there by what is left behind.
Mem without her mother
. Mem is the thing that will be left behind. She begins to sob so hard she shudders, she cannot breathe out, she tries but the holes inside of her will not stop growing, sucking in the air, burning on the wick of the same desire, that first instinct she always has when she sees a hole: the urge to fill it up.
Mem fills her hands with her face.
Don’t cover your face, you have to feel exposed
. She hears the Lessons chiming in her ears and drags her hands back down.
If you are crying they cannot ignore you. If you are crying they cannot really see you. Your tears make you disappear. They make the world disappear. They are all the power of water and salt mines. They paint as they roll and shine in the dark. If you are crying, they can always find you. And since the inside of the mouth is always wet, after dawn and daybreak are gone, they might watch the first morning sun drink up your tears but still taste them drumming in their mouths
.
Grave Danger:
Shocking News That Could Save a Child—and Your Bank Account
by Judah M. Baer
Dirty money. Child abuse
.
Subversive gangs
.
No way any of that could be going on here, in Bucks County, right? After all, these are just the ills Philadelphia natives hoped to leave behind when they moved out of the city to Bucks County, a migration that helped to drop urban Philadelphia’s population from 2.5 million to 1.3 million in less than ten years.
But there is something happening in our community that is just as corrupt as anything you’d expect to encounter in Philly. It’s a horror most of us don’t even know is taking place, even though it could be happening right now in the house next door. And—according to local authorities—it’s a phenomenon that needs to be stopped.
Something To Cry About
According to Bensalem Township’s Lt. S.R. Loccke, dozens of local little girls are being forced to live their lives as part of a nationwide underground cult, suffering serious physical and emotional abuse and being made to perform humiliating rituals in front of strangers for money. “Some of us have seen these girls crying at funerals, without anyone suspecting they have been brainwashed by their mothers to be able to cry instantaneously,” she said, adding that most folks would be surprised to discover how many unsuspected members of this sisterhood live among us, shopping at the local supermarket, chatting with neighbors at the post office, or baking cupcakes for cluster fundraisers.
The case of “Mirabelle,” the little girl whose local performances have brought hundreds of phone calls into precincts throughout the Delaware Valley, continues to baffle local police. Although the precinct following her case doesn’t have any photographs of the girl on file, everyone who has called to make a report has been able to recall her appearance in great detail: small, about 4′11″, and thin, pale, with enormous dark eyes and black hair grown down past her waist. One testimonial described her as “very pretty but like she would break into a million pieces if you touched her.” Another says that she seemed “like she had hollow…bird bones” and that her eyes looked like “the eyes of those starving kids on TV.” Police have been unable to determine where the girl lives or what her legal name might be.
As part of a three-part series, we will be uncovering the truth about girls like Mirabelle, as well as unsuspecting victims in your area who have been bilked out of hundreds of dollars while suffering the new loss of a loved one.
Playing the Black Market
One such victim, a forty-nine-year-old Bridesburg resident and recent widow, explained that she was in a “weak and grief-stricken” state of mind when she was accosted in her own home by a tall, strikingly pretty woman in her thirties. The widow felt so pressured to properly memorialize her husband, she added, that it didn’t dawn on her that she was being taken for a ride until weeks after her husband’s funeral.
“At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing,” explained the widow, who has asked to remain anonymous to protect her family. “She [the woman] came into my house three days after my husband died and she…told me that she was there to help me through a difficult time. She was very nice and seemed to understand how I was feeling, so I hired her.” After making preliminary arrangements (the woman refused to provide a phone number or address), the widow paid the Wailer $200 in cash as a down-payment for her services. “I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute, is this even legal?’ But she seemed very calm and… assured, so I thought it was okay.”
It was a thought she would soon regret. At her husband’s grave less than a week later, she saw the Wailer she had hired waiting to perform, along with a young, emaciated girl about eight years old. “At first I was shocked,” she recalled. “On top of it being a school day, I mean, why would someone bring a child to this kind of thing?”
Again, the widow was too overwhelmed to question what was happening. Beleaguered by her own sadness, it took her a while before she realized that the woman she had hired—and the little girl—had started to perform. The sound they made together was so distressing during the lowering of the casket, she noted, that many of the mourners turned around to see what was going on. “People couldn’t stop staring at the little girl. It was amazing…people who weren’t even that close to [the deceased] started crying and some…people kept going over to her, one man even kneeled down on the wet grass to try to make her stop. It was like she put a spell on everyone there.”
Now, she says, she realizes that the tall brunette must have been the little girl’s mother, a thought that still keeps her up at night. “What kind of mother would make her daughter do such a thing? It still gives me the creeps.”
Getting Stiffed
Once the service itself was over, the brunette approached the widow to collect the rest of her fee. The widow admits that plenty of the attendees had
seemed genuinely moved by the performance and made a point of complimenting the woman and child before leaving the cemetery. Some even asked for her hiring information.
But once all of the other mourners were gone, the widow recalls, the woman made her move, telling the widow that the balance owed was three hundred dollars for her services and an additional three hundred for the girl. “I couldn’t believe it!” Smith said. “Nobody asked for her daughter to come. It was like she [the mother] was forcing me to pay for something I didn’t want.”
Too late, Smith realized that she had gotten herself involved in something that was illegal as well as immoral. “My mother used those women at my father’s funeral, and one of my cousins had hired three or four of them for her son’s burial, so it never occurred to me that it was against the law,” said the widow. “I knew I had to pay her what she was asking but I wished there had been somewhere I could call to complain.”
Now there is.
Spare the Sob Story
Last week, State Representative Anthony J. DePaul, Jr. (R-10
th
), pushed legislation through the House just days after the appointment of former State Revenue Secretary Ronda J. Daniels to head Pennsylvania’s Death Industry Task-Force. The new directive, slated to go into effect early January, will expand current laws prohibiting the hiring of professional mourners for funerals or any other public display of mourning deemed “obscene…or designed to produce an illegal audience,” overriding Democratic complaints that Republicans were exploiting an emotionally loaded issue in order to gain election-year advantage. Analyst Isshaihah D. Walker has been following develop-(Continued on page 13A)
T
he first article comes out on the day of Mem’s eighth birthday. Mem’s mother says that it is the best possible publicity, but she is concerned that the police might start watching and figure out who they are. She is
kvelling
with pride for Mem but tells her to not take any of the newspaper articles too seriously. She reminds Mem that eventually stories on paper will be all that survive humanity and soon after that all the water will be gone, and then the Earth, and the sun, and every scrap of documentation that any people were ever here, all the silly scribbling and cave paintings and film, and even the books, and the memory of books, because all roads lead to death and extinction. But the newspaper articles are at the very least proof that Mem has done the right thing, they are something she can touch and hold onto, something that might be able to keep her mother from going away.
Mem doesn’t like the attention, doesn’t like to be watched, but she loves knowing that hundreds of people a week gather round to hear the new prodigy cry. She loves watching her mother smile, loves the sound of the phone ringing to request her services. She feels, at those moments, beloved. All she has to do to make it happen is close her eyes and there is her mother’s dead face, phosphorescent against the white satin, already part-ghost. The mourners file by her casket like a production line of sad, dutiful factory workers. Then there it is, the tingling in the nose, prickling
behind the lids, and Mem doubles up, her sobs like the sound of an engine that won’t turn over. She heaves in rhythm until all of her insides are out. She won’t be surprised if she opens her eyes one day and sees her intestines dangling out of her mouth.
Already, Mem has her own calendar book to schedule her engagements. She has already been asked by some of the Aunts to help train their daughters, to share the secrets of how exactly she is able to rip herself in half, to break apart and dissolve. Even so, Mem’s last job the week the article comes out is a relief. She has been working one site after another, filing past the rows of tombstones and the cones of plastic flowers with her handkerchief ready, speaking to no one, distracting herself by running through a list of all the words the clergy use so that they don’t have to say that someone is
dead
. So far she has heard
depart, perish, sleep, expire, succumb, fall, go to a last reward, be at rest, pass, pass on
, and
pass away
, but Mem doesn’t like any of these. They all seem like lies to her. The words Mem likes best are the ones used by other children, younger people who are not mourning. These are words they are not supposed to say but Mem hears them whispered anyway.
Give up the ghost. Kick the bucket. Buy the farm. Croak. Push up daisies. Check out. Stone cold. Drop dead
. Her favorite is when they call the person a
stiff
. This is an example of appropriate naming, Mem thinks, calling something exactly what it is.
It is amazing to Mem how unreliable most other words can be, amazing the things one mouth can create, surprises popping out like tricks pulled from a magician’s hat. Even more amazing what a mouth can become: scissors, spikes, salve, guru, envy, comfort, chain, door. Open door. Locked door. A door with ten thousand keyholes and no keys. One keyhole and ten thousand keys that each can fit but only at very specific, very unpredictable moments.
To celebrate Mem’s birthday, Mem’s mother takes Mem and Sofie and Aunt Ayin to a restaurant, something they rarely do. The restaurant is decorated in a sea-ship theme. Fishing nets and life-savers are nailed to the wall and the windows are trimmed in very dark wood that has been polished to a high gloss. The paper placemats are decorated with black-and-white
starfish, anchors, and lighthouses that you can color-in using a small box of crayons on the table. Mem wants to color-in her starfish while she waits for her hamburger but the crayon box only contains an unpeeled brown crayon and half of a white one that is smudged with other colors.
At the end of the meal the pretty blond waitress brings out a little cake, white with pink frosting that spells out
Happy Birthday
. Then waitress takes Mem’s hand. “We have a magic treasure chest full of special treasures,” she says, using her other hand to shake a large loop hung with dozens of keys. “You can try one key in the lock. If your special key works and the lock opens, you can pick out one special treasure because it’s your special day!”