Synecdoche by Petersen Schoonover

The feet were on the chair. There was no body with them; it was just a right foot and a left, resting like a pair of shoes on a department store rack.

Jenni screamed, the kind someone makes when taken by surprise. But she was in an unfamiliar, dark hotel room where things could meld and curl into what they weren’t. Had she thrown her bra on the chair? She had, hadn’t she? Those were the cups of her bra. That was it, yes. They were the cups of her bra.

She yanked the quilt over her face. It was her fourteenth job in as many weeks; she vowed this would be her last one and she was going to take a vacation—a real vacation. Her business, Gone With the Wind, ferreted urns to far-away places to spread ashes for families who didn’t want to bother with the whole thing.

Some families wanted loved ones scattered in town where they grew up, dropped from airplanes during huge family picnics or spread at sea during sailboat races; edgier ones wanted the ashes fashioned into clay pots or varnished into the housings of grand pianos or porch furniture; still others, she’d read once, had their loved ones’ ashes crammed into fireworks. Fireworks! None of her clients would do that. Her clients despised their deceased loved ones, and so, all expenses paid, thank you very much, I’ll go and give your loved one an appropriate spreading wherever you desire so you don’t have to feel guilty. Gone With the Wind, indeed.

But there was no reason to be spooked by what was in the bright orange silk TSA-approved package sitting over there next to the wide-screen. She reminded herself that it was supposed to contain the ashes of a nasty old billionaire—one who had summered with three different mistresses at this very hotel before “dying of some weird all-over rot,” according to his daughter in an Earth Day is Every Day T-shirt—but that it didn’t. There were no ashes in that urn. There were no ashes in any of the urns that she delivered.

Every urn she carried contained anywhere between five and a half to six and a half pounds of dirt.

* * *

At two a.m., Jenni awakened to the soft pad of something on the carpet.

She had thrown off the quilt and reached for it, to find that it felt heavy, as if there were a book on top of the covers. Had she been reading a book? No, she was sure she hadn’t been. She opened her eyes.

The feet were perched on her chest. The jagged nail on the right toe was crusted black with dried blood, and the left foot sprouted long, whip-like hairs.

She shrieked and dove for the bedside lamp, a cloisonné-looking thing bedecked in leering peacocks. The switch was on one of the beaks, and its sharp point bit her hand as she snapped on the light.

The feet were gone.

Someone banged on the wall, and the painting above her head reverberated. She jumped.

“Hey! Do you mind?”

“I’m okay!” she shot back.

She groped at the fluffy duvet cover, making certain the feet weren’t hiding. The urn was still where she’d set it, next to another lamp in the shape of a toucan. She took a deep breath and thought she should go wash her face, take a shower . . . maybe it was just that she needed to feel clean. She had carried a box of dirt all this way, and she hadn’t showered when she’d arrived, a ritual she almost never skipped . . . she traveled all over the world, and she’d become fond of the tiny rosemary soaps, bergamot-lime face masks and mandarin orange lotions. She didn’t even know what types of delicately-wrapped goodies awaited her in this bathroom. That, that was the problem—she had interrupted her routine.

Dirt. It’s only dirt in that urn, she reminded herself again.

She went into the bathroom, gripped the gleaming spigot, and turned on the water. In the spun gold basket next to the sink there was a bright pink bottle of face-wash, VanillaRose, it read, and she unscrewed the cap and lathered it on her hands, set it on her face. Vanilla was supposed to make you calm, after all; she’d heard somewhere that stewardesses wore it, even though she was pretty sure she’d never smelled it on any of the ones who’d served her cocktails recently. She could feel the tingle on her skin, the brush of feather dusters and rose petals. The vanilla part of the cream was fine; the rose, though, was cloying. Not at all like the scent of the robust roses at the farm, where her clients’ loved ones were all enjoying retirement.

Grandma fed the prize marigolds, Aunt Kitty galvanized the corn maze, Uncle Ivan nourished the Golden Delicious. Gone With the Wind took a few thousand plus expenses from the families, then turned around and reaped a few bucks more from the “Featherbrook Farm—the Most Fruitful on the East Coast!” that took first every year for its triumphant tomatoes, burly butternut squash and preternaturally perfect pumpkins. Nothing, Gerald said, nothing made his produce blossom like human remains, and half of her blushed whenever she thought about what she was doing.

Half of her felt guilty.

No, there wasn’t anything wrong with the practice, she thought. She made some extra under the table, she fed the earth, and it wasn’t as though she was disrespecting the families, those nasty, wealthy families. She was ceremonially doing what they’d paid her to do, staying in luxury hotels in far-away places so the ashes of their bastard loved ones could be spread in a manner appropriate to the amount of assets they’d had. It was certainly nothing worthy of being punished by a pair of spectral feet. Hah!

She bent over the sink and rinsed her face. She closed her eyes and groped for a towel, and when she stared at herself, an eye blinked back at her. It had been blue, once, maybe; it had a film over it and a skein of blood across its white.

A thousand birds beat in her chest and she clamored backwards, falling and striking her head on the towel bar. The towel fell over her face, and she gasped, pulling it off, spying the hotel logo in a flash of pink.

And then she passed out.

* * *

In the dream she was pawing at her ear because a bee had stung it, and when she opened her eyes she was on the floor of the bathroom. The ceramic tile was cold on her back, and her face was sun-burnt tight from the red heat lamp beating down on her.

A sharp pain splintered her ear and she swatted at what something there, something wet and soft—

—a mouth. Fat, moist, bruise-colored and crammed with rotting yellow teeth. “I don’t belong here,” the lips said. Blood trickled from its white-crusted corners and made a soft spat on the tile.

“Get out!” she shouted, struggling to reach up to the vanity for something, anything. She seized the china soap dish, and it fell to the tile and shattered. “Get out!” She hurled the shards at the mouth. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

The mouth vanished.

From the bedroom, she could hear the neighbor banging again. “Knock it off or I’m calling the manager!”

“Sorry!” she shouted back. She didn’t want that. Or maybe she did. What would the manager see if he came here? He would see the soap dish, and she would be charged for it.

And he would see all the blood. Speckled on her nightgown, smeared on the tiles. In one puddle there was the impression of three toes on her right foot.

She gripped the edge of the vanity and helped herself to stand, and when she peered in the mirror, she saw blood running down her neck. Her ear, throbbing, was bleeding.

The lips bit me.

She stumbled from the bathroom, and something grabbed her ankle—a hand, its dirty nails long and curling into themselves. She tried screaming but all that came out was a pathetic yelp, and pain shot through her knee and thigh as she tugged to break free, but the thing tightened its grip. She seized the door jamb to give her leverage, but instead she lost her balance and fell, landing on the floor with a thud.

Now the hand had a mate, and it grabbed her other ankle.

“Let go!” she heard herself say, and then was surprised to hear sobbing from her own mouth, let go, let go please, please, please . . . she closed her eyes and willed them to let go, like she had often willed herself warm by imagining she was laying on her back in a sun-drenched garden, which always worked, sometimes she could even smell the sunflowers, but not this time. This time her willing them to disappear wasn’t working. Near her was the suitcase stand, leaning against the corner, something she’d never seen much use for. She groped for it, seized one of its metal dowels, and dragged it, whacking her own leg and shrieking in pain when she felt a stab and heard the crack of her shin.

She heaved the heavy stand over her head and came down again on both of her ankles.

The things curled up and slithered away like garter snakes.

For a few minutes she lay on the rug between the door to blessed escape and the room; she found she couldn’t move her legs, because when she tried, it was as though someone had bound them in bed sheets. She bit her lip and focused on the carpet, on the pattern, its curlicue feathers, orange and yellow and brown. She dug her elbows into the pile and pulled herself toward the desk, the desk with the urn.

She was certain that whatever was happening to her had something to do with that urn. And she didn’t care anymore what balance the family had paid, the dirt was going. It was going now. Into the toilet, where, when it met the water, it would turn to cement-paste like the voracious lahars on Mount Saint Helens.

She was aware of her breathing; loud and wheezy, like small quantities of air forced out of a bag with a pin hole. It frightened her; she held her breath.

She could still hear it.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not looking,” she said, but it came out as a choking sob. Tears were in her, an overwhelming sadness. In her head she had a vision of someone rotting in a hospital bed, watching the door for a visitor, and no matter how much that person called or begged, no one ever came, and she saw a long night, a watch kept on the sodium light outside the window. It was all so much sorrow and the sobs coming out of her throat were mingled, mingled with irregular breathing that was not her own. She opened her eyes.

Before her swelled a pair of blackened, yellowed lungs.

Something thick was in her throat. She coughed and tried to breathe, she’d been here before, once, in third grade, or maybe it was second. She’d had an apple for lunch and she was laughing with her friends, they were sharing jokes, bad ones, about the guy who’d run his wife through a wood chipper, and then . . . she couldn’t breathe. Her face had burned, and she had been choking and people had been slamming her on the back and she remembered focusing at the mauve Formica table-top and eventually out came the piece of apple, a little larger than a few teeth . . . and now she opened her mouth to scream at the lung, or maybe scream help to that person next door, but she couldn’t because her throat was full and scratchy as though she had swallowed a bird’s nest.

She made a fist with her left hand and punched at it, and it popped into nothingness, like a balloon.

Her elbows were stinging with rug-burn. She could move her legs now, but when she did, something was hot in the shin bones. She seized the desk chair and began to haul herself up, but wobbled when she was half-standing, and she reached for the bright orange urn.

She fell to the floor, the lamp, the urn, the chair, all of it tumbling, and the urn spilled open and out poured real ashes. She knew them from their smell, that burnt-smell, like flour cooking on a burner and wood smoke. An old boyfriend had said that about wood, wood turned to ashes but it didn’t become any less or more than it was as a solid. It was the same wood, only in a different form, and how had she grabbed the wrong urn? She was sure she had scooped it out with that pewter scoop she used, like the kind you find in candy stores, she could remember doing it. She could remember doing it.

And then she remembered, no, the man’s ashes were taken out of a bright red urn not an orange one.

So who was this person?

She felt like she was going to throw up, and she forced herself to roll over on her back only to see a bloated stomach over her, a hairy bloated stomach with a pale white spot on it, as though someone had shaved there, shaved there to put some kind of tape or something on it . . .

Someone was knocking on the door.

“Hello in there?” Knock, knock, knock, knock. “Hello, is everything all right?”

She tried to answer, but nothing came out. All she felt was that lump of apple, burning with bile around its edges.