Nobody dares say it aloud but there’s a sense of appreciation surrounding Clyde’s death. Which is a horrible thing to say, but nobody says it. We think it. Feel it. Tell ourselves, walking home from school on long, thin October days, that these are the same trees he used to walk past, the same dark-eyed houses, the same sightless stone cherubs, balancing bird baths on their hideous heads. We make pilgrimages to his parents’ house, pretending to have been his friends. We make up stories. Paint him as the reluctant hero, the well-meaning villain, the inciting incident in tales of junior-year bravado. His parents never notice the plot holes in the homespun mythology. It must make them happy to imagine their son was so loved – that the secret sadness inside him wasn’t so gigantic that it eclipsed everything else that he was.

Sometimes we’re taken up to his room, preserved exactly how it was the day-of. Bed unmade. Heartbreaking participation trophies with cheap-plastic divers dangling forever. Family portrait, Clyde-age-twelve, looking out at the camera with a sullen expression, like he somehow suspected that this picture, the zit on his chin, would last forever. For some reason, we always let ourselves think that this time the mysterious glow around Clyde’s death will be bright enough to blot out the truth of his life, which seemed normal and boring and sad and a little too much exactly like ours. Clyde’s parents will cross the room, hovering lovingly over the framed photo, leaning into each other, oblivious to our quick fingers sliding a GOOD EFFORT ribbon off a nail in the wall or an ossified fortune cookie off the dresser. Fresh produce for the Clyde-economy, which is still thriving, still flooded with counterfeits.

The only way to tell what baby tooth or pencil-mauled-by-bitemarks is the authentic article and which was a cheap imitation is by the stories they come wrapped in. The Zippo lighter Clyde won in a bet.  The cathedral in a snow globe, from some trip to Europe his family took, which Clyde confessed, high at a party he probably never went to, was the first and last time he ever felt he belonged somewhere. 

The best way to make a Clyde story sound real is to simply insert his name when you’re telling a story about yourself. The time you shot a bird with a BB gun and felt so wretched afterward that you spent all day and most of the evening trying to find her nest and eggs, never once questioning if she had either or if she was even a she. The time you hid in the clothes rack at a thrift store to see if they’d lock you in at closing, and the terror you felt when they actually did. The real way you got fired from your first summer job, not the story you told your parents to save face. You got to see which sins were forgivable. You could finally feel free after puking it out of you. It didn’t matter what you’d say, how humiliating or inexcusable it was, because it wasn’t you, it was Clyde, and Clyde’s fucking dead. 

His final moments were bad and slow, if the stories were to be believed. Bad and slow and lonely. It’s common knowledge, even among some adults, that if you manage to sneak into the indoor pool after-hours you can see Clyde, pale and transparent, caught in an endless swan dive towards the bone-dry bottom. Or that his face lingers in certain bathroom mirrors. Or that if you pick the right booth in a certain Chinese restaurant after sunset, you can feel cold fingers brush yours as you reach for your fortune cookie. We don’t tell his parents those stories. Those are for us. We need them – especially these days. When knock-offs and relics of the one-true Clyde have accumulated in our own houses for so long that we can no longer tell which had once been his and which had been ours all along. Or when it’s late at night, when we’re stuck awake with the sound of Clyde’s bare feet springing up and down on the diving board, those stories really help. Which is a horrible thing to say and the reason nobody says it. We just think it. Feel it. That, if this is what happens when you die badly enough, then maybe there’s hope for us all.

Gordon Brown grew up in the deserts of Syria and now lives in the deserts of Nevada. Since arriving in the New World, his work has previously appeared in Hunger Mountain Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Nightscript, and elsewhere. He spends his time writing feverishly and looking after his cats, of which he has none.

I don’t think Mom meant to be a pain, but mummification’s hard to come by. The closest Egyptologist—apparently a real job—is in Chicago, 400 miles away. Am I supposed to lug her body in my trunk? Manson Funeral Parlor offers burial or cremation only. I didn’t bother to ask. Godly people, the Mansons.

Leroy says the ancient Egyptians were godly, too. Godlier—all kinds of gods. Leroy says he can do it. I say taxidermy’s not the same thing, and he assures me he’s not going to treat her like a prize buck, she deserves better than that. She does deserve better. She knew it, too.

Mom only got into Egypt after her diagnosis, had to squeeze one last passion in there, but Leroy’s a real buff. Used to read me bedtime stories from the Book of the Dead whenever Mom dropped me at his house next door, short notice, so she could take ballet lessons in the county over, or harvest shiny glass corn on her friend’s cousin’s sustainable farm, or try out for some movie filming in the city, leaving me with Leroy and his deer and pheasants and squirrels until I was old enough to look after myself. Now Leroy tells me the Book of the Dead is more like books—etchings and scrolls cobbled together over time. But those scraps are enough to manage. He’s tried it before, he says, on his aunt’s pet cat. The ancient Egyptians mummified cats sometimes.

I ask if he wants any money, not that I have much. Leroy says it’s an honor, he loved Mom, everybody did, life of the party, but if I could pick up supplies, that would be great. I don’t ask if it’s legal. We both know the answer to that, and so did Mom.

First, he’ll remove Mom’s organs, place them in jars. He says Hobby Lobby has some nice jars. Later he’ll dry her with salt—like jerky, I think. Then he’ll wrap her in linen. There are prayers and rituals throughout the process. He’ll let me know so I can come for those parts, if I want. The whole thing will take more or less 70 days—that’s how long the priests took. He makes me a list.

I was trying to say goodbye, and she wouldn’t stop talking my ear off about her akh. There’s the ka, which hangs out inside the mummy, and the ba, which she said was like a soul but sounded more like a ghost, floating between town and the tomb. Then there’s the akh, which is the part that actually travels to the afterlife, and she was worried about her akh getting lost, she’d always felt so lost. I was surprised she admitted it, but I guess that’s what people do on their deathbeds. I kissed her temple, promised I’d do everything right, make sure she got there safe.

Best to scratch off the easiest items first. Book of the Dead Spell 105: make sure the dead don’t go hungry. At the corner store, I grab one of those honey-cinnamon granola bars she liked and a can of tangerine LaCroix. Incense—still have some nag champa in my bedroom. She hated me burning it when she was around to smell it, but I think it’s supposed to be symbolic. Natron? Internet says it’s some kind of ashy compound from the bottom of dry lakes, people used it as soap. I raid the bathroom drawer with all the mini-soaps she stole from hotels.

Mom’s going to need more salt than Leroy’s aunt’s pet cat, so I go to the one other person who saw her the way I did, more pilgrim than adventurer. Saw her long before I did, chose to see her, though they never married. We don’t talk much—he was never Dad—but I know he’s coming up on retirement at the Public Works. When I break the news, he gives me all the road salt my car can take, sacks of it in my backseat, the weight of it so heavy you can see it in the wheels.

Spell 26 protects the heart. Leroy wrote out the passage: My heart is mine, and is content with me. At Hobby Lobby, I wonder what kind of jar Mom’s heart belongs in. Not this tacky heart-shaped mason jar. The vases are prettier, but they don’t have lids. There’s a teal and gold glass jar for twenty dollars. It’s a little out of my budget, but what’s a budget to eternity? I’d never begrudge her that.

My haul barely fits inside Leroy’s garage, between the bins of foam animal forms and plastic tubs of glass eyes, shears and scalpels and needles and scrapers hanging from the walls. He’s already got Mom’s body on the table, still wrapped in the sheets where she died, the last bit of warmth she’ll ever feel unless we can get this akh thing going.

Leroy asks if I thought about a tomb yet. I admit that I have not. I ask if he knows a good pyramid nearby.

Our house next door is the closest thing she had to a home, and she only slept there as much as she did because of me. On the pullout couch–she knew I’d make better use of the big bedroom. The little bedroom is hardly more than a closet, which is how she used it, clothes and shoes and bags, a few cardboard boxes of mementos that I never touched, though she never asked me not to. I’d still rather not go through them. I’d rather bury her in the little bedroom with the tokens of what might have been homes. But the house, sturdy as it is, wasn’t built for that kind of lasting.

Leroy says not to think on it too hard. Spell 188: She begs that she may come and go, that she may have power in her legs…a true akh, equipped and divine. That’s what all this is for, so she can get there on her own.

Becky Robison is a karaoke enthusiast, trivia nerd, and fiction writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate of UNLV’s Creative Writing MFA program, her stories have appeared in [PANK], Paper Darts, Juked, and elsewhere. When she’s not working her corporate job or walking her dog, she serves as the Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine.