Funeral Songs for Dying Girls: List 1

I can buy dollar-store paint and put fairy doors on the wainscoting and actually believe they’ll be opened after midnight.

If my mother were to haunt the most suitable thing here, it would be those quiet divots between songs on her records, sending Morse code messages in the cracks and pops of the speaker.

But even if we had lived in a cramped condominium where he might try to make up for the lack of a mother with hand-crafted dollhouses and bright pink walls like other single dads, even if we’d somehow managed to purchase one of the million-dollar Cabbagetown homes down the street with a shared driveway, even then I would have chosen to tag after him to the dusty buildings that made up the defunct older chapel and burning chambers.

I was sitting on a slab of marble inside a mausoleum, eating Lucky Charms out of a Tupperware container.

I had a similar haircut to the one I wear now though—a blunt-cut bob that came to my shoulders, with straight bangs. Only, back then I wore it all pushed back with a plastic headband. And it had a lot more tangles and random debris in it than now—sometimes more than now.

I used that tomb as a clubhouse from the age of about five until I turned twelve, when our groundskeeper Floyd fixed the lock. I was macabre in that way only motherless children can be.

Thomas Blight may have been quiet and unassuming, but he was a fascinating human to observe.

First, there was the way he walked, like a loping gazelle with extra-long legs and arms that paddled like down-covered oars.

Dad displayed my mother’s photo on the mantel like an Oscar statue; having a woman that beautiful love him was the greatest accomplishment of his life.

Zlatcho’s own mother had already died by then, and his father had defected from the clan, so there was no one to protest the marriage to an outsider.

They lived together for the rest of their days, raising their only daughter—my mother, Mary Bax Kalder—in a dilapidated house on the outskirts of a small town.

It sounded like a fairy tale, crammed with broken clocks, embroidered vests, cloudy gem-crusted cuffs, and beaded moccasins.

And so, by carving her love into each fish, she inadvertently became the Zorro of filleting.

Then, the summer after my mom met my dad and decided to follow him on his travels into the Far North, Faith and Zlatcho died in a fire that ate up their home and all its trinkets in one swift gulp, as if without the third person, balance was lost and they tipped off the edge of the world.

My mom and dad were out on the barren lands of the Northwest Territories for most of her pregnancy.

Would I still be there now, a tiny ghost haunting the marrow and eardrums of a living mausoleum?

He ran all the business at Winterson, from church services to equipment repair, and he was wearing his usual gaudy pinstripe suit, which would have been okay except that the stripes were three tones of green, none of them the right one.

“Oh, well, that’s a story in and of itself now, isn’t it?”
I struggled not to roll my eyes. Why did people feel the need to give such convoluted answers to the simplest of questions?

He held out the same, slightly palsy hand for my dad to shake, which he did, in a slow, meandering fashion.

He held out the same, slightly palsy hand for my dad to shake, which he did, in a slow, meandering fashion.

I pointed at our dog laid out across the cold kitchen tiles, frantic to invoke something other than myself in this argument. The dog barely twitched an ear at the sound of his name.

“So I thought, who better to take care of my own little Dingles here than my own little Winifred? You two won’t be gallivanting anywhere soon, so he’ll have a nice home here with yous, and with plenty of room to run around too.”

We looked where she was pointing, down at her feet where an obese mass was either solidly napping or completely dead. I tried to imagine him running anywhere; it was doubtful that his legs worked—they kind of just poked out of his rolls like sticks with calloused roots at the end.

I looked with sentimental eyes at everything in the small, sun-soaked kitchen, everything rendered with a touch of loss in light of the uncertain news.

And, of course, we both knew what the real emergency was—Mom was here, her ashes buried inside a small metal urn near an elegant willow that wept with lush greenery or skeletal grief, depending on the season.

He got up and started rummaging in the pantry for dinner provisions.

Strung straight across the far corner, from rafter to rafter, the hammock started in on a low, even sway, and I felt better right away.

I’d never had a real bed, just this hammock with a hanging fringe that’d gotten a bit frayed and dirty at the ends, strung from one corner to the other, right by the front window.

In my hoard was an abandoned bird’s nest shaped like a straw tornado; a tiny raven’s skull; two beaded hair ties from my mother’s regalia, the beads getting milky with age and storage; rocks shaped like other things.

Beside the jars was a collection of comics and classics culled from the stacks of used books at the Goodwill store.

I imagined a hundred ways to make money, from lemonade stands to part-time jobs to garage sales to petty theft.

Living in a cemetery obligates you to be an ambassador for Halloween, and I was aware that, as I was newly in the double digits, I only had a few years left.

I pulled the voluminous hood over my head and skipped down the stairs, cutting through my father’s seldom-used office at the bottom of the stairwell and bursting out the side door, all red velvet and spindly legs.

I took the narrow path that led from our place through the garden and around the crematory, down to one of the main roads that ran across the property like cobblestone arteries.

I tried to stop breathing for long minutes at a time, to become the lithopedion that could have saved my mother; the stone child that had chosen to keep its eyes closed, tiny fists thoughtfully poised under a dimpled chin, forever.

Whenever I thought about my mother, whenever I imagined the tragedy of her death, there I was—little, pink, seemingly innocuous Winifred, like a soft, fuzzy time bomb.

“Is it a Little Red Riding Hood homage?”

Peter, not paying the best attention, was a few steps ahead of the woman I presumed was his wife, and the shuffling of his feet over the crumbly grass alerted me to the fact that I was no longer alone.

Winterson, being adjacent to the Necropolis, the oldest cemetery in the city and an official part of the tour, was often inadvertently included on the tour by those who were easily lost and did not notice the gate between the two lots.

I heard them above me, from the shovel cellar behind the willow, as I was locked in an accidental staring contest with a hairy spider hanging from the center of its considerable web.