Naomi Stenberg is a queer, disabled writer living in Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Review, Knee Brace Press, Sea Salt Chronicles, Corridor, and elsewhere. She was the co-editor of Other Voices, an anthology for writers with mental illnesses.

Funerals

I am getting ready for work. Ironically, I am ironing a black dress. A friend has come over after calling to say she has to see me. “Tiger shot herself in the head,” she said. 

I turn, calm, yet to be informed by death, holding my steaming iron like a shield. “But she’s alright, isn’t she?” 

“No.”

The strange thing about funerals is not just all the weird-ass pageantry but the events leading up to them, like short films, crisp in black and white, surreal.

I’m thirty-seven years old, hiding out in my nephew’s tree-house. My parents had died the day before. They took my mom’s body from the car before I could see it, but I saw my dad, still alive, in the ICU. Blood from a head wound had filled the wells of his closed eyes. I thought he’d been blinded. When prepping him for surgery, a nurse had cut the LL Bean label from his shirt. It lay on the gurney. I focused on the tiny square cloth to keep from screaming. 

Now, I’m in a tree. My niece has flown in and climbed the ladder to say hello. She is bigger than she was last time I saw her. She is obese. Normally, I would never have pointed that out. But normal has left me. “You used to be a mere slip of a thing,” I say to her. She seems surprised, hurt. I notice this, but have developed some form of trauma Turrets. I direct the phrase to her two more times...”slip of a thing...slip of a thing.” She leaves. I am exhausted. I go talk to the dog. 

For Tiger’s funeral, morticians reconstructed her face so she could be viewed in an open casket. Her dad was drunk and spoke at length about France.

More Real Than Us

I remember the house, my house, its bright cherry doors, the long lawn made for children, the barn, the plum tree with its plums strewn on the lawn in season, the banty hens by the barn, little feathered soldiers on their beat, pecking at the plums. I remember how it all could have been filmed. And all of us, my parents, and my three siblings. 

“Your family is so perfect,” my friend Sandy said once. “So happy. Your family is so happy.” I remember I turned to her without words. How could I explain to her how lonely we were, how we drifted through that house like Jesus ghosts, ephemeral and uncomplaining, lean from our yearning for contact with each other, just another day waiting for the Second Coming which had promised us joy? How could I explain how lonely we were—how our conversations, while always polite, were devoid of life because we could not or were not supposed to be angry, sad, or upset, and were, therefore, on mute? We lived in expectation like strangers waiting for a train, each of us packed and ready, our satchels and baggage neat, our names pinned to our collars. When Jesus came, we would be neatly sorted out, our misery explained we hoped in a glance from him or one of his subordinates. How to explain that kind of waiting, an entire childhood suspended above ground in a pure kind of holiness, a cult-like holiness, in that kind of waiting? 

The plum tree grew its spindly branches and proffered its plums and was more real than us. The grass in the lawn grew and was mowed and was more real than us. The banty hens who ate the plums waited for nothing but another plum and were more real than us.

Little Criminal

When I was six, I stole a bubble gum out of a big tempting bin at Albertsons, gave half of it to my cousin, Erin, so it would only be half a sin to my juvenile Christian thinking. The stolen bubblegum made my sin list for years, the sin of wrongs I’d committed that I recited to myself while falling asleep, a grueling way for a child and later adolescent to greet slumber. 

Finally at age nine, under the accusatory lamp of the kitchen light, I confessed to my father and brother my heinous crime of stealing a bubble gum when I was six. Their horn-rimmed glasses were the beacons of doom, and they were so upset with me. No sympathy for having been a child, vulnerable to simple cravings. Just ire. Gestapo. My brother wanted me to write Albertsons and confess my crime and give them a penny’s restitution. “How could you have? How could you have?” my father said. 

Their lack of compassion and forgiveness for me gave me rich material for therapy later, but also made for one of the loneliest moments of my childhood. I was so alone. The whole incident erroneously confirmed for me that I was as bad as I thought I was.