Illustration by Andy Paciorek
WINNER, Fall 2024
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY EMILY VER STEEG
They want me to explain why I stopped burning the bodies. My lawyer says it’ll give people peace and then maybe they’ll go easy on me. But I can’t say what I did was wrong so if that’s what you’re after probably just stop reading.
And it’s not burning. People kept saying that on the news and at the trial and that’s not what it is and it bothers me that people keep saying it. We don’t set people on fire. They just go in a real hot oven and then all that’s left is bone fragments. So don’t call it “ashes” either.
So I’m explaining why I stopped cremating them because I never burned them to begin with.
The first day it happened, the day that started it all, was just like a normal day until it wasn’t. It was maybe six months after Dad died, which they made a big deal about during the trial but I don’t think it really has much to do with his death. Although it’s true what they said on the news. I did cremate him myself, and I don’t like to talk about it because now I know I shouldn’t have. But I was just like you then, trying to do something nice for someone I loved who died, and it turned out that the nice thing I did wasn’t really nice at all. God showed me that. He opened my eyes, and now I’m trying to show you and open your eyes. Maybe if you read this, and other people read it, the next person you know who dies can be buried instead.
Well anyway I turned on the retorts—that’s what we call the ovens. I don’t know why the ovens need an official name but that’s what it is. Maybe so no one thinks we bake bodies, although I guess we kind of do. Really it’s more like vaporizing. Bodies vaporize at 1,800 degrees, and that’s the temperature the retorts need to reach, but we had these older models that took two or three hours to get that hot. So while I waited I did like administrative things. I looked at The List, which is just a spreadsheet. It says what bodies we have and where they came from and when they needed to get cremated, and yes, it’s a little old fashioned to have a printed list but Dad always insisted on it. He said working with the dead was sacred and we should be as intimately involved as possible. Even marking through someone’s name with a ballpoint pen, he’d say, is a way to honor their life. But a click? To turn someone into a click of the mouse? And he’d shake his head. That’s why I’m pretty sure God forgave him because for Dad it was still about being respectful, as respectful as possible. I guess you all were trying to be respectful too now that I think about it. I’ll ask God to forgive you. Dad would say that about the click of a mouse whenever I talked about how a computer software system would streamline things, help us get the backlog down. But really all crematories have backlogs. It’s just too many people wanting to be cremated and not enough crematories to do it. So if you wanna get cremated you’re gonna have to wait about three weeks. Or your family is at least. But that might be good. It’ll give them more time to change their mind.
So I was waiting on the retorts to get hot enough. I swept the floors and a delivery guy brought a body from a mortuary somewhere in Atlanta. I started sweating, the retorts were close but not quite ready. I opened some windows. We have AC but it doesn’t really stand a chance against the heat of the retorts. I figured while I wait I’d send a shipment of remains out so I drove to UPS. It’s okay to leave the retorts unattended for a while. Like I said, it’s not really an oven. There are safety mechanisms built in.
You know I hate going to that UPS. They’ve got this guy working there, Greg, and he always says just dumb stuff to me like do I ever get nightmares? One time he was like, Cold weather affect anything?
And I said, like what?
Like with burnin um, he says. He’s holding people’s remains in his hands when he goes and says something like that.
And I’m like, It’s not burning.
And he goes, The ovens still get hot in winter?
I work all year don’t I?
I hear more people die at Christmas, he says.
You know, like that. It wasn’t even winter when he said it. People just don’t understand. I mean, they understand cremation mostly. What people don’t understand is why someone would want to work around dead bodies, but someone’s gotta do it. It’s a perfectly respectable career. Dad always said it was an honor. And sure, I disagree about the whole cremating thing now, but Dad had his convictions and I have mine. He was a good man. I think God knows that.
Well I guess I haven’t even gotten to the whole point of this letter yet. I’ll skip to the part where I heard the knocking. I remember my shoulder hurt, the right shoulder. My doctor had said I was messing up my rotator cuff, but it’s real physical labor I was doing, and no time for a break. Anyway, I’d just got some bodies into the retorts—we can do five people at a time—and I heard someone knock at the front door. I thought it was weird because I wasn’t expecting anymore shipments that day.
But when I walked to the front door I saw it standing open. I’d forgotten I left it that way to help circulate some air. Sometimes I’d get woozy if I didn’t do that. People’s surgical implants and dental fillings and stuff vaporize too, it’s no telling what all I breathed in. I think that’s ultimately what got Dad sick was just the air quality. Another reason not to cremate people is that it’s hazardous. Sometimes the Lord does stuff like that to warn us. Sin’s bad for your body and your spirit. We gotta start listening to our bodies, they’re telling us something about the spiritual world. But instead of listening to them we try to get rid of them.
Okay, well the back door was open too. It was a nice fall day, good breeze. Then I heard the knocking again. Sometimes the retorts make a sound as they adjust to the heat. It’s usually as they’re warming up though but I thought maybe one of them was about to fail on me. They were pretty old, like I said.
But that wasn’t it either, because I heard the knocking again when I stood there in front of all the retorts and the sound didn’t come from that room. It was coming from the morgue.
So I stood in front of the closed door to the morgue and that was it. Something inside was knocking about. My heart’s racing, I figured a creature of some kind, squirrel or raccoon, had gotten trapped in there. Out back of the crematory is just all pine trees—or it used to be before they started developing it. So I thought maybe something crawled inside. I inched the door open and flipped on the light but didn’t see anything.
Then the knocking happened again, and it was coming from one of the refrigerators, an occupied refrigerator. Now I’m thinking I really blew it. Dad would be furious. A critter had gotten inside with a body. What if it gnawed on it? Or shat on it? Technically no one would ever know, but I felt like I’d let Dad down. I gripped the shiny metal handle with my sweaty palm—our morgue looks just like the ones on TV, by the way. Just so you can picture it in your mind. A room with a bunch of drawer-like refrigerators, and when you open one the body is there on a metal rack that rolls out.
So I open the door and roll out the body, expecting to see something bad. I won’t describe what I thought it’d look like because an animal eating a dead body is too gruesome for some people to think about. But nothing was in there, except the body of course. A lady named Monique from the Golden Oaks mortuary in Knoxville. I peered inside the chamber where her body’d been, the cold air drying the sweat off my forehead. I didn’t have anything to catch the critter with, so I don’t know what my plan would’ve been if I saw it.
And then she started talking to me. Monique. The dead lady.
Things get fuzzy here so I can’t remember all the details. It was the scaredest I’ve ever been. My pants ended up wet somehow, my chest hurt and I couldn’t get a breath, I was all shaky.
But basically she said, Please don’t burn me.
And I don’t think I said anything back at first.
It’s bodily, she said.
Then I’m wondering if she’d been alive this whole time, like you know how sometimes people have such weak pulses that they’re declared dead and then they wake up? It’s happened before.
So I said, was there a mistake?
But she said she was dead. And she kept laying there saying she couldn’t be burned.
I backed out of the morgue and ran to the office. The List agreed she was dead. Been that way a week. I pinched myself, bit my tongue, smacked my face, anything to try and wake myself up, but I was awake already. And my jeans were getting stiff. Luckily I sweated through my clothes so often that I always had extras so I pulled on a clean pair.
I thought I was just tired or something, so I went back to the morgue and cracked open the door, just peeking through. Monique blinked up at the ceiling.
She said it was bodily again, and she never looked at me the whole time. For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, she said.
I knew it was from the bible somewhere but at the time I didn’t know where. I know I talk a lot about God and stuff now, but at the time I’d backslid. Didn’t believe in it anymore. But Mama kept making me go to church. And when I was a kid I had wanted to be a preacher, you know. I guess I kind of am now, if you think of a preacher as someone who tells what the real truth is. But I stopped believing when everyone else could speak in tongues and I still couldn’t. I was thirteen or so, and I had got baptized with water but apparently not the Spirit, and I figured none of it was true and everyone else was faking. My Spirit baptism just took longer I guess. He’s got His own timing.
But back to what I was saying. I was still scared but I managed to push her back into the refrigerator and close the door. She kept knocking and I just ran out of there. The morgue, the crematory. I got in my truck and drove home.
I was home early so Mama thought I was sick, and I must’ve looked sick because I could tell from her face. She told me to go lay down. I tried closing my eyes but every time I did I heard Monique’s voice and saw her blinking. After a while I sneaked into Mama’s room and grabbed Dad’s old King James from where it still sat on his side table. I looked in the concordance under TRUMPET and found the verse: Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. Then I flipped to the familiar passage, the one everyone read in church. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions. And I knew it had finally happened. I’d got my Spirit baptism.
If you haven’t been baptized by the Spirit you don’t know what it’s like. Everyone was all wondering if maybe I had made it up, or my mind played tricks on me, but when you know, you know. And I knew God was telling me something. Monique had said it was bodily, the resurrection, and me and Dad had spent our whole careers destroying bodies. I asked Mama about it and she said Jesus could do anything—he was Jesus. He could take the remains and make them into a body again. And then there’s all the people who died so long ago they were all decomposed now, so they might as well’ve been cremated. Jesus can give them a new body too.
But it’s about respect. Just cause Jesus can redo something we messed up doesn’t mean we should keep messing it up. It’s his, he made it, and it’s not our job to decide to unmake it. I was in a real big funk for a while after this, thinking about all those people I’d cremated. And you know Dad had just died and he’d cremated even more people than me. But he didn’t know better, and God forgives us if we don’t know better. Now though I did know better, and it would’ve been a sin to keep doing something God showed me was wrong. I know you’re thinking that dead bodies can’t talk but we are talking about God here. He does miracles. And he’s made things talk that don’t normally talk all the time. The donkey taking Balaam to go curse the Israelites, Samuel’s ghost with Saul. I mean the whole idea of speaking in tongues is saying things you don’t normally say.
You didn’t know better either when you asked me to cremate your loved ones, but that’s why I did it—or didn’t do it, really. To help you not sin without knowing it. But now, if you read this far, you do know better. One day the trumpet will sound, just like the verse, and the ground will bust open with all the people dead coming back to life, and this time they won’t get sick and die anymore. That’s what it means when it says “incorruptible,” and just because it’s corrupted now you think you should get rid of it? Vaporize it all away? We are a temple for the Holy Ghost. “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” He was talking about the temple of his body but if our bodies are temples too, then Jesus will raise us up just like he raised himself up. And it was a bad outcome for the people who destroyed the temple of his body. And they didn’t even cremate him.
Anyway, I went back the next day and Monique was still blinking and begging, and I wasn’t about to cremate someone who didn’t want to be. What if she screamed when I put her in? I opened up all the other refrigerators and asked those people did they want to be cremated, and all of them said no. Every body I got after that said no. I asked every one of them just to make sure. I don’t know what I would’ve done if someone had said yes, please cremate me, because I still wouldn’t have wanted to. But no one wants to be cremated.
And I mean you all know what happened next. I buried everyone in the pines. They all got their own small funeral ceremony, just me praying over them. Monique stopped begging soon as I laid her in her grave, and everyone else closed their eyes to rest and wait to be resurrected. I ran out of places to bury them after a while, and my shoulder really couldn’t take the digging anymore. On the news they talked about the pine tree woods like it was some sort of horror movie scene, but even the people I covered up with just sticks and leaves and pine needles were thankful. They told me so. I did it respectfully.
Nobody believed the prophets when God sent them to Israel, and they were put in jail too, and even killed, which I guess I won’t be. But all I’m saying is it’s God’s work I’m doing. Or I was doing. If I’d have closed the crematory those people would’ve got sent somewhere else and then still cremated, so I had to stay open and help them. My lawyer wanted me to see a psychiatrist, said if I got some diagnosis with a bunch of consonants in it then I could maybe get out of the jail time. But that would be a lie, and lying’s a sin.
So I can’t really apologize for what I did, but I am sorry you didn’t have your loved one’s remains with you the whole time when you thought you had. I guess that was a lie, to send you crushed up gravel instead. So I’m sorry about that. But when God calls you, you just can’t say no. So I am sorry that you feel like your loved one’s bodies were disrespected, but really I respected them. I respected them more than anyone else.
Sincerely,
Dean Sanders
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Emily Ver Steeg grew up outside Atlanta, GA, but now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she teaches writing to immigrant and international students. She received her MFA from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University, and her work has appeared in Vita Poetica and Solum Journal.