I knew that cleaning out his house would be an act of closure. But as I sat in front of the old place, my car idling and pumping hot fumes into the misty autumn air, I struggled to wrap my mind around the idea that the Mayor was really gone. It was still difficult to fathom that a guy so vivacious, a man after whom I had modeled myself, was as mortal as the rest of us. The Mayor, or “Grandpa” as I called him, had played tennis until ninety-three and had walked his former three-mile mail delivery route just to say mornin’ to everyone in town, right up until the day he died. And all it took was a slip in the shower to end it all. But why had he slipped? He’d had all of his mental facilities and was still self-sufficient. Had he tried to move in a way his frame wouldn’t allow? Had something surprised him? Or was it as simple as people that age just slip sometimes? I hated that I would never know.

I reached into my pocket. The newspaper clipping I had cut out of the Times Union was wrinkled and torn. I’d been carrying it with me as a reminder that the Mayor’s death was real. 

Shellard, Martin J. MECHANICVILLE Martin John Shellard, 95, died in his home on Thursday, October 19th. Known to many as “the Mayor” because of his outgoing personality, Martin worked as a mailman for fifty-six years. After the tornado of 1998, he notably trudged through the wreckage to ensure that mail service continued. Martin is preceded in death by his wife Delia, brother Paul, parents Rosie and Joseph, and his son and daughter-in-law, Frank and Terri. He is survived by his grandson, Thomas. Services will be held at the Devito-Salvadore funeral home on Wednesday, followed by a dedication ceremony at the Mechanicville post office.

The Mayor’s house was filled with a quiet worse than silence, absent not of all sounds but missing a few specific, expected ones: a percolator bubbling away, the television playing reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The house was so devoid of life that I noticed the little ambient tones I would normally tune out. Painfully present were the creaking of the house and the subtle rattling of closed doors shaken by the faint wind of an ever-moving draft. The refrigerator buzzed with devilish consistency.  

There had been offers from people in town to help me clean out the house. I’d almost said yes to the Mayor’s friend Bob Nash because he’d recently lost his grandson to a new designer drug called Spider Dust that had been turning rural teenagers into zombies for the past few months. But the Mayor had always said, “Accept help from no one, give it to everyone,” so I told Bob I needed to handle it myself.

The Mayor’s house was simple—two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, bathroom, garage, and basement. He kept few possessions. His hobbies were socializing, tennis, and watching television, so outside of the necessities (a color tv from the seventies, some Levi’s jeans, an old lamp), most of what the Mayor owned were keepsakes. There was the key to the town that the real mayor had awarded him after the tornado and the commemorative fountain pen he got for his twenty-fifth year with the postal service. He had drawers full of thank-you letters for the little favors he had done. A thank you for the time a tree fell on Barry Glenn’s Buick and the Mayor went over with his saw to cut down the branches. Or there was when he climbed up on Cindy Straub’s roof in a rainstorm to fix her antennae so she could watch a football game.

  On top of the dresser that housed the thank-you notes were the dusty family photos. You’d never have known it since he was such an upbeat guy, but tragedy had followed the Mayor throughout his life. The photos, viewed from left to right, painted a linear tableau of his sad story. 

Closest to the window was a print of the mayor’s brother Paul, who died from Polio at the age of three. Next were the Mayor’s parents, Rosie and Joe, both of whom died during the depression.

Grandma Delia, pictured with her high cheekbones and warm smile, may have had the most tragic death of all. The Mayor never talked about it, but through conversations with people in town, I was able to glean that the Mayor, Delia, and their baby boy—my father—had gone hiking at Thacher park to celebrate the first day of spring sometime in the early ‘50s. Delia, who was an avid hiker and a burgeoning photography enthusiast, brought along her Brownie camera to snap photos. At one point, Delia asked her husband to pose with their son for a photo, but when she stepped back to adjust her frame, she tripped over a raised root, fell off a ledge, and tumbled through a hundred and forty feet of sharp branches and rocks. Her camera was never found. 

My parents, last on the shelf, died in a car accident six months before I went away to culinary school in Boston. My relationship with them at the time was strained, and their deaths, left me with tremendous guilt. Had it not been for the Mayor’s stabilizing presence in my life I’m not sure I would have made it through that difficult period. I’ll always owe him for that.

I decided I would host a garage sale to sell off any functional items I found in the Mayor’s house and had already told a few neighbors about the idea. I started the cleanup in the kitchen. The kitchen was a tiny nook painted a faded seafoam-green color. Three and a half tiles were missing from the floor, and the waxy wood of the folding half-moon table was chipped and water-stained. I had eaten so many bologna sandwiches at that table as a kid in the eighties that just looking at it I could smell the stale but not unpleasant odor that would escape from a bag of Wonderbread. Two slices of bologna, yellow mustard, cheese, pickles, and bread. If I served something like that at the restaurant, the critics would crucify me (though they always found a way to do that regardless). But the mayor’s signature sandwich was surely a latent inspiration for my interest in food.

The cabinets were sparse—silverware, pots and pans, a chef’s knife. All garage sale items. The fridge was so empty that it had an echo, and the lone item in the freezer was a birthday cake that had been cut in such a way that I couldn’t tell if it was meant to say Happy 88th birthday or Happy 68th birthday. And while I was relieved not to have encountered the Creature from the Mold Lagoon in the fridge, the lack of food did raise an interesting question: How had the Mayor been sustaining himself?  

He was friendly with a few restaurant owners in town, but there was no way they were feeding him for free every night. And he certainly couldn’t afford to eat out all the—

TV dinners. Of course! He always ate those TV dinners. How could I have forgotten? When I was a kid, my parents would always pick me up before dinner time, so I didn’t eat many TV dinners. But thinking back, I remembered that when I was saying goodbye to the Mayor, he would often be in the middle of heating up…

Salsbury steak. That was it. Salsbury steak with tater tots, carrots, and apple cobbler, the same dinner every night. Yes, TV dinners. But where did he keep them all? I couldn’t recall seeing a second freezer in his house, but to eat that many TV dinners, he must have had one. 

The lone overhead bulb in the garage buzzed as it emanated its flickering tungsten glow. I scanned the room. The floor was dusty and coarse, and there were stains from where rainwater had snaked under the garage door. The Mayor had not owned a car since the 1990s, and the only notable objects in the room were a couple of garbage cans and two shovels—one metal and one plastic. There were a few empty boxes of beer—Blue Moon, always Blue Moon—a workbench with a thick burlap blanket draped over it, a gas-powered generator, and a standalone shelf that housed crusty cans of paint. No freezer, must be in the basement.   

I turned off the light and was about to leave when I noticed something odd. The lightbulb, though shut off, was still buzzing. I flipped the switch a few times, and the buzzing continued. I left the light on and stepped back into the garage, listening for the source of the sound. The quiet-worse-than-silence, in this case, helped me. The sound, which I had first misidentified as coming from the ceiling, was actually coming from the direction of the workbench. I went to the bench and took the burlap blanket into my hand. The fabric was rough and smelled of WD-40. I folded the blanket back and peered under the bench. There it was an eggshell-white, top-loading freezer.

I lifted the lid and peered inside. Stacked high, was an obscene amount of TV dinners. There had to be sixty, maybe seventy of them in there. And they were all Salsbury steak! My first thought was that I should donate them to a local food pantry. But as I looked closer, I saw that most of the dinners were freezer-burnt and far past their expiration dates. 

I shook out a garbage bag and began dropping TV dinners inside. The deeper I dug into the freezer, the older the boxes seemed to be. A few featured advertisements to Enter now to win a CD player. It was like hopping into a TV dinner time machine and traveling back in time. After removing one of the TV Dinners, the boxes shifted such that they formed a little window to the bottom of the freezer. This gap revealed a large piece of meat, pale in color—a slab of pork, no doubt—with the skin still on.

But why did the pork have a belly button? 

I disposed of the TV dinner, then removed another box. And when I saw that the pork not only had a belly button but was also wearing frilly underwear, I dropped to my knees and vomited.   

I considered shutting the freezer door and pretending that I hadn’t seen anything. But I had seen something, and it’s not like I could avoid the freezer forever. The handsome young real estate agent who had made an offer on the house said he wanted everything out. I couldn’t leave behind a…

A what? What exactly would I be leaving behind? 

I stood up and began pulling out TV dinners, this time with a weary delicacy. Rectangle by rectangle I emptied the freezer until no TV dinners remained and I was confronted with the grisly reality of what lay below.      

I was no stranger to dead flesh. I worked with raw meat at the restaurant and had attended the open-casket funerals of both the Mayor and my parents. But in both cases, the true ugliness of death had been sugarcoated. Chickens and cows had their heads removed at a butcher shop, and we would refer to their dismembered limbs as “cuts”. And as for my parents and the Mayor, they had been worked on by morticians to ensure that in their caskets they looked calm and comfortable. 

But seeing the horror in the freezer was a jarring reminder that death is not always calm and comfortable. Death is struggling to breathe. Death is delirium, fear, and panic. It’s surgery and ventilators, and the worst smells you can imagine. Death is having your heart stop in the middle of the night and not getting to say goodbye to your loved ones. Death is rot and dehydrated skin; it’s bloating and pressure and expansion. Death is withering away. It’s everyone else moving on. Death is being forgotten.   

And that’s all just the standard, died-of-old-age-in-a-hospital variety. 

Death, in the case of the body in the freezer, was a far more blasphemous enterprise. It was, for her, a jaw snapped wide open, crooked, and unhinged; it was a neck, rubbed raw on the sides, bent forward so far that her chin pressed into her yellowed chest; it was sunken eyes behind high cheekbones, ribs jutting out from an emaciated frame, legs broken at the knee and folded upward to make them fit inside the freezer. It was long, calcified nails and purple skin.

Death, based on the look of her makeup (blue eye shadow like all the older girls used to wear back in the eighties), was sitting in the bottom of a freezer in a garage for thirty-five years. No, we aren’t all lucky enough to go peacefully in our sleep. 

I stared at the pork—no, not pork, body—for twenty minutes, frozen with terror. She’s in the freezer and I’m frozen, I thought. I let out a nervous, involuntary chuckle, then covered my mouth and began to cry. This couldn’t have been the work of the Mayor. He would never. It had to be a favor. Somebody else had killed…and he was storing it for them. He would do anything for a friend, and maybe this—

But it wasn’t that. I looked at the body, then at the generator that the Mayor had bought in ’89 after a big storm knocked out the power for eight hours, and I knew it was him.  

I dialed 9-1-1. But when I went to tap the green call button, an invisible force held back my trembling finger. The sequence of events that would transpire played out in my mind: 

The dispatcher would ask me what my emergency was, and I wouldn’t be able to put it into words. I’d only be able to tell them the address and that someone should come by. The town sheriff, Jim Hartigan would take the trip over to investigate what was happening at his old buddy’s house. I’d meet him out front and would finally be able to explain what had happened. Jim, always pragmatic, would say something like, “Have you gotten yourself into that Spider Dust shit?” I would bring him into the garage. Hardened by years on the force, he would try to control his reaction, but wouldn’t be able to stop the smile from dropping from his face. He would suspect me instead of the Mayor and would have me sent to the station for questioning. I would tell the truth, which everyone would doubt until the forensics report came back and showed that the victim had been frozen since I was in middle school. At that point, Jim Hartigan and everyone else would be forced to reckon with the fact that there was only one person who could have been responsible: the Mayor. News crews would arrive and follow me everywhere, and if the story drew enough attention, I would have to close down my already-struggling restaurant and declare bankruptcy. When interviewed for television, people in town would say “You never really know a guy,” or “I always knew there was something off about him.” And someone—probably Hope Hepworth, the local English teacher—would write a book and make a fortune. Ted Dolan, the elected mayor of Mechanicville, would un-dedicate the post office. The real estate agent would back out of the deal, and I’d have to sell the house whatever I could get. The new owner would raze the place, and all of my memories of eating bologna sandwiches with the greatest man I ever knew would be buried beneath a condominium. The Mayor would become a stain on the legacy of the only town he ever loved. 

 Or…

Nobody would find out. There would be no news crews, no restaurant closings, and no bankruptcy. The family of the victim, if she had one, would go on living their lives the same as they had the past thirty-five years. The Martin J. Shellard post office would live on, and nobody would ever have to have their delusions shattered about their favorite mailman.

I started thinking of ways to dispose of the body.

The first step would be getting her—it (it’s just a body, I had to tell myself, no different than a half beef at the restaurant)—out of the freezer. I found a pair of crusty work gloves and put them on. I went to the freezer, reached out, and took hold of the body’s freezer-burnt hand. The hand was stiff like a carrot, with none of the plump, fleshy bounce that should be present in the palm and fingers. I gave the hand a small tug to test my grip, then bent at the knees and reared back. The body, frozen to the bottom of the freezer like a tongue to a metal pole in the winter, did not move.

I found a bowl in one of the kitchen cabinets that I could use to transport water out to the garage. I filled the sink with water and dropped in a few still-frozen Salsbury steaks. (It was important that the thawing water be cold because warm water could induce spoilage and bad smells.) When I poured the water into the freezer for the first time, the body made crackling sounds as the decades-old ice crystals began to release. It took me eight trips to gather enough water to submerge the bottom half of the body. Its eyes, or rather its eye—the left eye was closed and the socket was a bruised purple color—seemed to follow me across the room as I went back and forth. 

I sat by the body as it thawed. I wanted to get back to cleaning the house, but I was unable to shake the irrational thought that if I looked away any longer than I had to that something bad would happen. Sitting there, studying the wretched thing in front of me, I noticed that there was an obscurely familiar quality to the facial features, though what, given how debased those features were, I could not place. 

When the bottom of the body was soft, I opened a fresh sixty-five-gallon garbage bag. I grabbed the body, this time by the thighs, and propped it up. The face stayed statue-still as it dipped beneath the water. Careful not to make a mess, I slid the giant garbage bag down over the body’s broken broken legs. Then, leaning the legs over the edge of the freezer and tilting the body up like a seesaw, I was able to get the torso up straight. As the head rose, it dripped gray water from its stiff, wiry hair. And when the smell of spoilage wrestled its way into my nostrils, I did gag. 

I laid the bag on the floor and went outside to get my car. It was getting dark out, and the autumn air, which that morning had been so refreshing, was beginning to feel cold and show signs of the impending winter. I backed my car into the garage.  The door couldn’t have been open for more than thirty seconds, but that whole time the garbage bag was in view of the road, and my heart was thrashing. 

The garage was small, built before families owned two cars. I had to lean against the wall to get the body into the trunk, which put a painful strain on my back. Before I left, I tested the car to make sure it was in working order: headlights, taillights, brights, windshield wipers, blinkers, and gas. I even checked the registration. As I pulled out into the hazy Mechanicville evening, I had one thought on my mind: Too late to go back now.

I drove two miles per hour under the speed limit the whole way, checking my rearview mirror to see if anyone was following me. I also looked down at the back seat a few times, though I’m unsure what I expected to see there. I picked out a spot by Hathaway’s drive-in movie theater. It was across the Hudson from Mechanicville, and the woods over there were isolated, the kind of place you’d never have a reason to go to…unless you wanted to bury a body. 

I parked just off the road where the car would be hidden by tree cover. It was dark in the woods, but the moon cast enough light that I could see what I was doing.

Unlike in the movies, where the grave-digging part of hiding a body is normally glossed over, shoveling out a six-foot-deep hole in real life is grueling. It takes hours, and the sound of the shovel is loud, repetitive, and maddening. You get covered in dirt. It gets under your fingernails, behind your ears, and in your mouth. Your arms get tired and your back hurts and you get blisters all over your hands. The deeper you dig the higher you have to throw the dirt to get it out of the hole, and the more challenging it becomes. Worst of all is the fear, that debilitating fear, that you could get caught, or attacked by an animal, or that any of those unknown evils that used to lurk in the dark corners of your childhood bedroom might pop out and get you at any moment. For me, the fear peaked when the lip of the garbage bag blew back and the body’s face popped out, staring straight at me. It was only the wind, I told myself, but I still had to cover my mouth not to scream. 

When the hole was the same depth as my height, five-foot-eleven, I climbed out and grabbed the bag. The body was softer at that point, still frozen in the middle but regaining some springy give on the outside. I slid it up to the edge of the grave and shoved it in. It landed hard on its back with a dull thud.

I picked up the shovel and began filling in the hole. The body, face poking out of the plastic bag, watched me with its one good eye the whole time. Looking at the face as I covered it with dirt and worms, it dawned on me what the familiar quality was that I had noticed back in the garage. I let the shovel fall to the ground beside me and looked down. It was subtle, obscured by the damage that had befallen the face, but it was also undeniable: something in the cheekbones and the way they framed the eyes, bore a striking resemblance to my grandmother Delia.

No, no, I told myself, you’re slipping. Seeing your long-dead grandmother’s face in a hole in the woods is a bad sign. Keep it together. It’s just a body, it’s just meat. Cover it up, get it over with. 

I picked up the shovel and got back to work.  

I awoke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. I jumped out of bed, and for a moment, I had no clue where I was. Seconds later, I was hit with a clenching soreness that billowed through every cell of my body and brought with it a reminder of the previous night. Or… was it the previous night? What time was it? How long had I been out? Morning light shone through the window. I looked at my watch. It was only 9 am, and I had laid down around 8:30. But then why was my hair dry? I checked the date on my phone. I had slept for a full twenty-five and a half hours.

The doorbell rang again and my throat tightened with fear. I pictured police officers at the door. Somebody must have spotted me driving late at night and called the police. The police must have followed the tire tracks to the scene and found the body. I pictured them entering the house, seeing a sink full of waterlogged Salsbury stakes, and smelling the rot in the garage. They would find the freezer, which was lined with two inches of dirty, DNA-rich water.

In a flurry of flailing limbs, I let the towel drop to the floor and pulled on a shirt and pants. The doorbell rang again. 

“Just a second!” I called out. I grabbed some cologne from my suitcase and doused myself in it to mask any lingering scents. I ran to the front door, took a breath, and opened it. 

“Hey there,” Bob Nash said, standing in the doorway, a friendly smile on his face.

“Hi Bob,” I said, my heart rate returning to normal. “What’s going on?” 

“I know you didn’t want help cleaning out the house,” Bob said, “but I saw your car in the driveway and…well, Margie made snickerdoodles, so I thought I’d offer you some.” Bob produced a Tupperware from behind his back. 

“Thanks, Bob,” I said and took the cookies, noticing that I still had some dirt under my fingernails.  

“Family recipe,” he said with a proud nod. 

“Yeah…well, I should probably be—”

“You know, I could help you,” Bob said. 

“Ah, Bob, I appreciate it, but I already told you—”

“With your critter problem, I mean. I’m real good at killin’ critters. Me and my grandson used to get ’em all the time.” 

“Critter problem?” I said. 

“The scratches,” Bob said and motioned to the reverse side of the open door. “Looks like a mean one,” Bob said. “Big son-of-a-bitch.” 

I stepped outside and peeked around at the other side of the door. There were two messy tracks of scratch marks running up and down, four claws—or nails—per side.

“Probably has rabies,” Bob was saying.

There was a smattering of blood at the bottom of each set of scratch marks and even more on the porch in front of the door. 

“I got an extra gun,” Bob said, “so maybe…while you’re still in town…” 

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. 

I waited until Bob had driven off, then took a walk around the outside of the property. I was hoping, praying, that I would run into an animal, a big raccoon, or maybe even a black bear. But I knew in my gut that whatever had made those scratches was no animal, at least not the kind you would normally see in upstate New York. 

I felt something squish under my foot near the back of the house. I looked down. There was a shriveled patch of leathery material, about the size of a credit card, on the ground. It was beige-yellow with hints of purple and was swarming with maggots. 

I ran inside and locked the doors and windows. I was shivering and had to lie down on the floor to regain composure. I told myself it had to be an animal, that any other explanation would be too absurd. But could it be more absurd than what I had already experienced?

I thought of canceling the garage sale and leaving town then and there, but I had already advertised it and couldn’t risk anyone asking questions. Instead, I decided that I would move the garage sale up to tomorrow and blow out of town the first opportunity I got. This meant that the cleaning, which I had planned to take my time with to allow for reminiscing, would have to be done with ruthless efficiency. 

I began with the mess I had made myself—Salsbury steaks in the garbage, water sopped up with a towel, freezer cleaned with bleach. I went through the bedrooms and threw away any clothing that showed the slightest sign of wear. Anything that could be sold I stuffed into a plastic bag without bothering to fold it. I broke down the bed frame and leaned the mattress up against the outside of the house. Everything in the bathroom went straight into the trash. I sprayed the bathroom with disinfectant and closed the door. Good enough. If the new owner didn’t like how I left the place, he could bring it up with me on the phone, after I was far, far away. 

The only items I kept were the photographs and the Mayor’s letters. Nothing else felt like it was worth taking the time to go through. By the end of the day, I had cleaned out the main level of the house, leaving behind only the living room furniture, which I would try to sell off at the garage sale.

It was night by that point, and there was only one place in the house that I still had to clean, the place I had been putting off out of fear but could no longer delay….the basement. 

The Mayor didn’t store much in the basement because of a flooding problem, but after what I had found in the garage, I knew I had to check it out before I sold the house. I armed myself with the chef’s knife and a flashlight then opened the basement door. Right away I was hit with the smell of mildew. The walls oozed mold, and the wooden stairs were so weathered that I had to walk down the sides for fear that they might cave under my weight.

Upon reaching the landing I tugged on the drawstring hanging from the ceiling. The light coughed to life, but there was so much dust on the old bulb that it shone dimly, casting enough light that I could see the outlines of objects but could not make out details. I kept my flashlight aimed ahead. The space was sparse and empty except for three cardboard boxes (two unmarked and one that formerly housed a television), the Mayor’s old mail cart, and the water heater, rumbling in the corner. The floor was muddy, raw earth, and lined with rocks. I had to step around a rat trap as I walked across the room. 

I took hold of one of the box flaps. The damp and flimsy cardboard bent between my fingers. I held it for a moment, preparing for the worst. I pulled up, opened the box, and…

Books, nothing but old, waterlogged books. I exhaled and leafed through the selection. Mass market westerns, a couple of non-fiction books about the industrial revolution. Nothing incriminating or grim. The other boxes yielded similarly banal results—a couple of toys I had played with as a child, some silverware, a pair of tattered tennis shoes, all items that could go straight in the garbage.

I turned to head back upstairs but noticed a small piece of dirty cloth balled up on the floor. When I bent down to pick it up, I saw the rope. It was uncoiled, peeking out from behind the water heater. I walked over, grabbed it, and gave it a little tug. The rope went taught, and would not budge. I followed it to its end, where it was tied to an out-of-reach pipe above the water heater. I looked at the rope again. It was weathered, and a few of the fibers were stained a deep red-brown color that looked like blood. I held the rope in my trembling hand as I remembered the condition of its neck, how it had been rubbed raw. A grim picture began to form in my mind, a transgression of cruelty, sadism, and brutality— 

There was a tap on the basement window. I fumbled the flashlight and dropped it to the floor. When I picked it up, I shined it on the window in time to see a shadow move across the foggy glass and disappear out of sight. I stood there, paralyzed for a moment, then let the rope fall to the floor and ran out of the basement. 

Upstairs, I flipped on all of the lights and positioned myself in a chair facing the front door. I kept the knife drawn. The quiet-worse-than-silence was pure agony now. Every little buzz, rattle, and creak was a deadly threat, and I was alone, alone, alone, a fly caught in a spider’s web. 

I didn’t sleep a second that night, and I only moved from my spot when I saw light through the curtains and heard cars passing by the house outside. I was still on edge, but in my exhaustion, the daylight provided a small sense of security. 

I went outside and the light blazed my eyes. The air was cold enough to see my breath, and there were no new scratches on the door nor any other signs of malicious “critters”. With the knife always within reach, I began setting up the garage sale. I was haphazard in my construction, placing items on the driveway and lawn with no thought given to presentation. 

People started showing up around nine, mostly familiar faces—Jan Rayburn, the librarian, Tammy and Dick Bloom, the Bilinskis with their little boy. Everyone’s behavior would follow the same pattern. They’d park the car on the street, walk up the driveway, and begin scanning the sale. They would pick up a few items and examine them. Some people would put the items back down and some would make an offer. But regardless of whether or not they made a purchase, everyone would come up to me and start talking about how much they missed the Mayor. 

“It’s so weird not seeing him on his morning walk.” 

“I don’t have anyone to play cards with now.” 

“The town is missing something without him.” 

I stood there with a forced and rigid smile, nodding along.

By noon I had sold most of the Mayor’s posessions, even the furniture, which Bill Duggard had taken away in his pickup. I was just beginning to feel like I might escape unscathed when Bob Nash pulled up in his Chevy. He behaved the same as everyone else at first, looking at the items on the lawn, picking a few up, turning them over. But when he approached me, the focus of his conversation was different.

“So this is all the Mayor’s stuff?” he said. 

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Any of it yours?” 

“It’s all mine,” I said. “I was next of kin, so—”

“No, yours personally,” he said, “stuff you owned before.” 

“Um, no not really—”

“Hey, you get that critter?” Bob cut me off.

“No,” I said. “I’m leaving soon, so I’m not too worried about it.” 

“My offer still stands,” Bob said. “I’m really good with critters.” 

“What critter?” Mary-Jane Henderson, the Mayor’s neighbor, said, stepping into the conversation. 

I started to say, “Nothing,” but Bob cut in again:  

“There’s a critter problem around here. Big one. Look at the door.” 

“Oh my,” Mary-Jane said. 

“Not good to let a critter run wild,” Bob said.

“I’m not letting it run wild.” 

“I thought you just said you were leaving and didn’t care,” Bob said.

“I don’t want it near my house,” Mary-Jane said. “You should get it.” 

“I’ve got it under control,” I said.

Bob looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I see what this is.” He nodded. “You…you’re trying to get it on your own. You don’t want my help.” 

“No, Bob, that’s not—”

“I’ve been trying to do you favors, maybe have a good time, us guys, and you’re here lying to my face.”

“Bob, I’m not lying,” I said. “I haven’t been looking for the—the critter.” 

“Then what’s with the mud?” 

“Mud?” I said. 

“On your tires. Looks like you’ve been doing some off-roading. Looks like critter huntin’ tires to me.” 

I looked at my car. The tires were caked in dry mud and leaves. My one slip-up, the smoking gun. 

“What do you have to say?” Bob said.

My lip quivered and cold sweat dribbled down my neck. 

“I…I, uh—”

I was interrupted by a shriek and a crash. I looked to my left. Tammy Bloom, pale with her eyes wide, was covering her mouth with one hand and pointing straight ahead with the other. I followed the line of her finger. The Mayor’s old TV was knocked over on the driveway, the screen shattered, and next to the TV stood an emaciated figure with yellow, rotting skin and blue eye shadow. Its bra strap was falling down its skeletal shoulder, and its knees were angled in, wobbling to support its weight. Its tibias stuck out from the bend behind its knees. It didn’t seem like it should be possible that the body could stand up after how badly its legs had been broken to fit in the freezer, but then again, it shouldn’t be possible that a body could stand up at all. 

“What is that?” Tammy screamed.

The body whipped its head to the side, then lunged forward and tackled Tammy. Tammy wailed as the body dug its nails into her forehead and pulled down, flaying her skin from her face like the peel from an orange. Tammy dropped to the ground and blood surged from her wound. 

The body turned its head and stared at me. The face was in such bad condition that it was impossible to read its expression, but I swear I could see a glare in its one good eye. Its movements were choppy and uneven, and its loose, unhinged jaw swung back and forth like a pendulum with each step. As the body gained its footing, it began to speed up, until it broke into a full-on sprint, right in my direction. I heard its bones clicking and cracking with each step until it lept forward and tackled me to the ground. 

It tried to go for my face, but I was able to get my hands up and block myself. Its nails came inches from my eyes as I grabbed its wrist and held them steady. It was strong, pushing down with a force more powerful than its bony frame should have allowed. My fingers sunk into its spongy flesh, and I felt brittle bone against my fingertips. It hissed and shrieked like a wounded animal, spraying black mucus and writhing maggots from its mouth down onto my face. Its hot breath, putrid and rotten like hot sewage, ravaged my airways. I grew dizzy and faint. I began to see double, and my grip on the body’s wrists began to slip. 

This is it, I thought. This is how it—

BANG! 

A loud explosion rang out that split my ears and turned the whole world white. For a moment, I thought it was all over, that this silent, white nothingness was the afterlife. But slowly my vision and hearing returned. I looked up at the body above me, its head now a concave cavern of crimson pulp. The body went limp and fell off of me, down onto the grass, where it stayed, unmoving. I looked up and saw the stunned faces of the people around me. I saw Tammy Bloom on the ground, howling in hysterics as the flesh of her forehead touched the bridge of her nose. And I saw Bob Nash, his gun drawn and smoking, staring at me.

“I—I got it…” he mumbled, then dropped to his knees and began to cry.

The case was open and shut. There had been six witnesses, including myself, all of whom corroborated each others’ stories. It went like this: A mad woman had crashed the garage sale and attempted to kill two people, and Bob Nash shot her in self-defense.

Identifying Jane Doe was an impossible task. The bullet had destroyed her face, and her DNA and dental records didn’t match any person in her age range (20-35) in the whole county. No drugs were found in her system, which was a pattern amongst victims of Spider Dust overdoses (the designer drug was still so new that the coroners hadn’t figured out how to identify it yet). They probably could have done more tests on Jane doe, but more tests could have meant problems for Bob Nash, and in the words of Sheriff Hartigan, “Bob’s been through enough.” So it was, another young person lost to drug addiction. 

I stayed in town a few more days as a witness, but I didn’t run into any issues. The day I left, I finalized the sale of the house, packed my car with only my suitcase, the family photos, and the Mayor’s letters, and hit the road. 

I was relieved to be getting out of the country and back to the city, but somewhere near Lee, Massachusettes, on I95, the emotions of my experiences hit me all at once. I pulled over to the side of the road and tried to compose myself, but I had so many unanswered questions. Impulsively, I reached over and pulled a few of the mayor’s letter’s out of a bag and began reading them:

To the Mayor,

Thanks for bringing Frank soup while he was sick. He’s feeling much better now…

Dear Mr. Mayor, 

Thank you for talking to my second graders about what it’s like to be a mailman. Little Ritchie Eberhart told me he wants to follow in your footsteps…

Dear Mayor, dear Mayor, Dear Mayor…

Every letter gushed with appreciation and awe. I kept waiting to find something bad, just one negative word about him in one of the hundreds of letters, but there wasn’t such a word. Thank you for this, thank you for that. A picture of a generous man, kind to end, selfless as they come. 

It just didn’t make sense. How could he have done what he did? This man, this wonderful man. He couldn’t have, not the Mayor. Not my Grandpa. It had to all be some misunderstanding. Maybe I had dreamed the whole thing. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. 

I began to weep, salty tears falling on the letters and dampening the old leaves of paper. Oh, how I wept. I wept for the mayor, and I wept for myself. I wept for my parents and my grandma Delia. I wept for the town and for time—the years gone by and the years to come; I wept for the good deeds and for the transgressions, for the lies we tell and the secrets we keep. I wept for the girl. Yes, the girl—the girl, the girl, the girl—who, now that it was over, I could no longer think of as anything else. Not a body, not meat, but a girl. I wept for her life and for her death. I wept for her name, lost forever*.* And most of all, I wept for her family. For her parents, siblings, and cousins who would never have closure, who would never know what happened to the girl they used to call something other than Jane Doe. 

Eventually, the tears ran out and my breathing steadied. I had gotten it out of my system, and my head was clear and light like mountain air. It was time to get back on the road, back to Boston, back to the restaurant and money troubles. It was time to worry about the little things and to face the everyday. It was time to move on.

I turned the keys in the ignition and put the car in drive. I looked in the rearview mirror to pull out into traffic, and something in the distance caught my eye. It was a slender and angular figure walking down the side of the road. It had an uneven gate and a limp in its step. There was something off about its head. Yes, its head was...

A hot terror shot through my body. I stepped on the gas and lurched into traffic, cutting off the car behind me. My car rumbled and shook as I got up to speed and tore down the highway. Foot planted firmly on the gas pedal, I drove straight ahead at full speed. I stopped for nothing, not even a bite to eat. But, no matter how fast I drove or with how much conviction pushed forward, I could not stop my eyes from shifting up every few seconds to steal a glance in the rearview mirror.