When I was twenty-one years old, I moved to the West Coast to “become an artist”. My best friend since birth—we were born two weeks apart—had a large laundry room sans washer/dryer that doubled as my bedroom. He allowed me to live rent free for eight months while I got settled. I was also supposed to spend all my free time writing, but back then I talked more than I wrote. A Proper Burial was the first short story I finished in Victoria. It took me three months. I submitted it to On Spec magazine. A letter came back right away; it was an R&R. Overwhelmed with excitement, confident that I was about to be published my first try, soaring high on the wings of my immense ego, I made a few tweaks and resubmitted. On Spec replied. They wanted a total overhaul of the story. I scoffed. “Pfft! I’m not compromising my artistic vision!” I crumpled up their letter, refusing to edit it further. This would be the closest I would get to publication for three years. I could fill a book with all of the rejections I received post-near miss. The lesson here is to be humble. Be humble. Then when you are humbled it won’t feel so much like getting humbled. These days I happily invite criticism. I will take critique over praise any day of the week. A few years later I returned to A Proper Burial and submitted it again—not overhauled but further tweaked. This time it was published. Phew.
Shortly into clearing our fourth house of the day I found a fat hollow lying flat on the ground in front of its toilet.
I staggered out of the bathroom, slammed the door, and stumbled down the hallway. I pulled my shirt over the surgical mask, clasping my hands in front of it in a vain attempt to stifle the putrid smell. This particular house had a second floor: I started for the first.
On my way down the stairs I ran into Brandon.
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
“Nothing. A dog. Britt and Sean are done with the basement and garage. Everything else is clear.” Brandon laughed. “Why do you have your hands up like that?”
“There’s one upstairs. It’s fat and blue. I’m going to need help.”
Back in the bathroom, Britt, Sean, and Brandon stood over top of me as I pulled the pants off its ankles. I found its wallet in the front left pocket. I removed its license and tossed the wallet in the bathtub. Each one of us had pulled our shirts over our masks, still unable to curb the smell.
“David Campbell. November 14th, 1997.” I looked at Sean. “Are you getting this?”
“Yep. Yep.” Sean pulled out the database from his breast pocket and shuffled through the files. “It’s a match.”
Brandon and I grabbed onto its arms and dragged it out into the hallway. When we got to the stairs, we heaved it down. It descended the slender staircase like a piece of plywood, knocking haphazardly into the walls. It landed on the carpet at the bottom with a deep thud, face up, left arm and shoulder, which had dislocated in the tumble, buried behind its back. The abdomen was discolored and bloated, about to pop.
We each took a limb and carried it outside to the refrigerated trailer we had hitched to the back of our jeep. Brandon’s shirt slipped off from over his mask. The mask fell from his ears as the shirt snapped back onto his neck. “Shit.” He held his breath.
Brandon dropped the arm he was holding and pressed a button on his keys. The door of the trailer slid open.
“Okay.” I mumbled while we positioned ourselves for the toss. “Ready?”
We tossed it into the pile of hollows that we had gathered earlier that day. The door to the trailer closed automatically.
Brandon exhaled. “Too early for lunch?”
***
Lunch was a salty sub-par bowl of chicken noodle soup boiled to imperfection on the fat hollow’s stove. The bread in its pantry was mouldy, so we acquired our daily carbohydrates by dividing the junk food stored above its sink. When we were finished, we swept any canned foods we found into a bag and put it in the trunk.
It was our job to gather any food we didn’t eat and take it back to base for partition. Some units found it nearly impossible to find enough food to sustain themselves, so, at the end of the day, any extra food was doled out to the units that needed it most.
We walked over to the fifth house. Sean followed in the jeep. A light wind brushed our faces and passed through our loose-fitted clothing. It was cold, much colder than the days before.
We were looking for one hollow, an old one. The door to the house was unlocked, so Brandon went back to the jeep to drop off the battering ram. He looked disappointed.
Little glass dolls in period dress were posed amidst miniature models of furniture inside a large china cabinet positioned on the south side of the living room. It was the first thing anybody saw upon entering the house.
“We’ll take the basement this time,” Britt said.
“Okay,” I answered, taking a step closer to the china cabinet.
Brandon started down the hallway. The floor creaked under his footsteps.
A door opened. “Clear.”
The cabinet was locked. On some of the dolls the paint had faded, their faces graying with age.
“Clear.”
At the top of the cabinet, a single doll curtsied in a tattered purple Rococo. Its head was cocked to the left, and its eyes pointed earthward as if it were in the presence of something odd.
“Clear.”
The paint on its cheek was flaked, and I could see inside its empty head.
“John?” Brandon called.
I heard a door open and close.
“Still here,” I called. “All clear?”
“Yeah.” Brandon chuckled, “Dolls. You have a thing?”
“Just curious I guess.”
Sean and Britt came up the stairs. Britt held up a limp, black and white kitten.
“All clear,” she said.
“All clear,” Sean repeated.
“I guess nobody’s home,” Brandon shrugged.
An absent hollow meant one of two things. Most often it meant it was out. Otherwise it meant that the hollow had sold the house after the last census. We guessed it was the former. Brandon filled out the notebook in the jeep. We would have to deliver the information to forensics who would use it to match the unidentified hollows they had laid out inside Rogers Place, our home base, in the heart of downtown. If it was in their database, it would be our job to find it among the thousands. They had them organized by demographic and surname.
We cleared five more houses by four thirty. Already the sun was beginning to set on the horizon, the sky a vision of oranges and violets.
The last house of the day was a bungalow with stucco siding and a front yard driveway. We were looking for four hollows.
We stationed ourselves in the living room in front of our first hollow. It was seated in its recliner. One of its legs had fallen to the ground, and the other rested on an ottoman. I threw my jacket down on the love seat beside it.
“Why don’t you take this one?” Brandon said, looking at Sean.
“Sure.”
Sean lifted it up by its armpits and dragged it from its recliner. He pulled the wallet from its jeans and took down the information.
“We’ll take the basement this time,” I offered. Britt nodded.
The interior of the house was cold. Ice had formed on the wire screens of the houses’ open windows. The only audible sound from where we stood was that of drops of water falling into a small puddle on the counter below the kitchen window.
One of the hollows was lying at the bottom of the stairs all twisted up. It must have been walking downstairs when the bombs went off. It looked to be about twelve.
With little hollows, identification was not always easy. If we couldn’t find a purse or wallet somewhere on or near the hollow, then a positive identity would have to be made by another means. Positive identification was crucial for invalidation. Without it, the hollow couldn’t be legally invalidated. We were required to match the census or supplied means of identification with a pictorial affect or government document found in the hollow’s home. It wasn’t too hard to find a picture of the hollow with its name written on the back of it, on the fridge or in its room or in its parent’s room. If we couldn’t find a match, we would have to mark it unidentified and forensics would tag it and seat it in the arena.
Brandon and I stepped carefully overtop of the little hollow at the bottom of the stairs. Brandon lifted it by its hair to check the face. I held the flashlight.
I heard Sean come back into the house. I shined my flashlight underneath the stairs.
“Clear.”
Brandon looked in the washroom. “Clear.”
I stepped into the laundry room. “Clear.”
I opened the door at the end of the hall. I shined my flashlight around the room. Bubbly sketches of animals covered the room’s pink walls. The bed was unmade. The sheets were tangled around several pillows.
On the far side of the room was a mirror with photos and sketches and notes pinned to its frame. In one of the pictures, the little hollow had its arm wrapped around a friend, both smiling. I pulled the tack out and flipped the picture over. Nothing. I pinned it back to the mirror. Brandon came into the room behind me.
“Is this its room?”
“Yeah,” I answered. I unpinned a different picture from the mirror and handed it to him. He looked at it, flipped it over, and gave it back.
He walked over to the closet and stepped through the curtains. I continued to sort through the pictures on the mirror. I tried to pin each one perfectly in place, so that the room looked undisturbed.
Brandon wandered over to the hollow’s desk and shuffled through the colorful notebooks and loose-leaf papers.
“Hey, John?”
Brandon tossed me the hollow’s school ID.
“That’s...it,” I said.
Britt found the other two in the master bedroom. I slung the hollow at the bottom of the stairs over my shoulder and carried it up. Britt and Sean had the three of them laid out on the living room floor.
Sean pecked at his notebook.
“All clear?” I asked.
“This is it,” Sean replied. He stared blankly at the three hollows in front of him. I still had the other one hanging over my shoulder.
“Just the three,” Britt sighed.
“Great,” Brandon said.
***
The drive back to base was quiet. Brandon drove. I rode shotgun while Sean and Britt rode in the back. It had stopped snowing at three, and the thin film that had formed on the road was trackless, a white canvas.
Britt hummed “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel.
When we arrived at base, the chrome incinerators were howling. They were lined up in front of the hole in the ground where all of the ash was deposited nightly. The sound of popping, as the air and fluids exploded from deep within the hollow frames, was a whisper compared to the rumbling of the generators powering the infernal machines.
We waited in line in front of the arena for an hour before backing our trailer up to the incinerators. We took the food and supplies inside while the invalidation unit took the hollows to be burned. The heat and smell made us sweat. Sean and Britt were still watching the unit pull the hollows out when we returned.
“I can’t do this,” Sean said. He handed Brandon the notebook and climbed into the back of the jeep.
When Brandon finished transferring the paperwork to the supervisor he started towards the front doors. I followed him.
Britt hesitated.
“You coming?” I asked.
She looked back at the jeep. “I think I’m going to stay with him.”
“Okay. We’ll be a minute.”
We walked through the entrance.
“What’s up with Sean?” Brandon asked.
“I don’t know. He’s probably just tired.” I paused. “I think we’re all tired.”
After waiting in line for a few minutes, we were directed to a clerk. We transferred over the files of the old hollow to his desktop where his eyes remained locked. He searched through the database.
“We’ve got a match,” he confirmed. He transferred the file back into our notebook and, without looking up from the screen, pointed to his right.
We entered the arena by the Zamboni room.
On the ice surface hollows were laid out side by side in evenly spaced rows. The rest were in the seats. In almost every section, hollows were being dragged, carried, and seated by forensics and people like us.
Brandon looked at the notebook.
Our eyes scanned the white numbers at the top of each section. Our hollow was on the other side of the arena, just under where the trestles crisscrossed beneath the ceiling.
“Fucking nosebleeds,” Brandon moaned.
The smell of rot intensified the higher we climbed. Our feet fell heavy on each stair.
Brandon shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Can you believe this?” He pointed at a hollow with long brunette hair. Its face still wore the makeup it had applied the day the bombs fell, although the makeup had mostly disappeared, sinking into skin that hung to its skull like a wet cloth. “So beautiful. There must be a thousand like it. What a waste.”
We found the old hollow hunched over in the seventh seat of the row. Though we cursed at the thought of having to make our way back, the trip to the surface was fast. We checked the hollow out and somebody else delivered it to an incinerator.
When we got back to the jeep Britt and Sean were sleeping in the back. In silence, Brandon drove the three of us back to the house we had emptied only hours before.
***
By the time I settled on the young hollow’s bed, the world outside was a blend of gray and black light. Looking through the room’s only window, I could see the top of a pine tree, vibrant and archaic, rooted to the edge of the property. Lying upside down and bringing my focus to the contents of the room, I tried to guess what it would have been like when the room was alive.
I couldn’t sleep. I got up from the bed and wandered around. I opened shelves filled with crayons and markers. I looked under the bed and found a bin of stuffed animals. On its desk, I found a journal with a fluffy pink frieze around a picture of Ariel. It was locked. I pried it open with a pair of tweezers that I had found in the hollow’s makeup kit.
I read the entries. From what I gathered it was happy, but, like everyone, it had its troubles. It had a mole on its left cheek, which others made fun of. It talked about its sibling. It talked about its father and mother, and their fights. It talked about a boy it was convinced it loved. It talked about the pet hamster it had got for its birthday and how one day the hamster died. It talked about how its mother had dug a hole beside the pine tree and how they had put the hamster in a box and in the hole and said a prayer for it. The mother told it that it would see its pet in heaven.
I closed the journal. The floor creaked in the living room upstairs. I could hear Brandon snoring in the room beside me.
“Who’s there?” I heard somebody whisper when I entered the kitchen.
“Sean?” I called.
He hid his face in his arms. He was crouched on the loveseat in his underwear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing. I—I thought I heard something,” he answered. It was obvious from his voice that he had been crying.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah. Just tired is all.”
“Okay then.” I turned to walk back to my room.
“John?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“Do you believe in a soul?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
***
The siding on the third house was pale blue and the roof had shingles a shade darker. We were looking for two hollows, newlyweds that had purchased the house one year prior to the bombs. Brandon had to break down the door.
The inside of the house smelt like baby powder. It was moderately furnished. The walls were empty and blue. They had an overwhelming abundance of appliances arranged on the kitchen counters, some of them still in packaging.
“Basement this time?” Britt asked.
“Sure,” I replied.
Stacks of boxes were amassed in the corners of every basement room. The carpet looked brand new. An air hockey table was set up against the wall furthest from where we stood. I checked the washroom first. Nothing. Brandon pulled the red puck out from the goal and put it on the table.
“Game?” He asked.
I laughed.
He hit the puck with a paddle: it stopped just short of going in.
There was nothing in the furnace room. The room adjacent to it was empty as well. In every room I looked there were stacks of boxes. In the room where the male hollow had stacked its tools, I found an instruction manual for a crib.
Brandon and I were about to speak when we heard someone yell something upstairs. I dropped the manual on the ground and bolted, followed closely behind by Brandon.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Britt and Sean had found the two hollows lying crumpled up together on the floor. The room they were in was painted pink with a wallpaper trim of horses and cowgirls. The room had a changing table set up in the corner, and on the far right, in front of where the two hollows had collapsed, was a crib.
Sean wiped the tears off his cheek. Britt rubbed his back, her other hand on his shoulder. They came over to where Brandon and I stood at the entrance to the room. For what seemed like hours we stood there.
“Well,” Brandon sighed.
“Well,” I repeated.
None of us wanted to be first. Brandon took a step forward.
“Wait,” Sean interjected.
Brandon took a step back. The floor creaked under his step.
Sean walked over to the crib. He reached inside and inched back the blanket. His hand shot over his mouth. “She looks just like she was asleep.”
“We should probably get going,” Brandon said. He bent down and dug into the father hollow’s pocket.
“Do we have to do it like this?” Sean said.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, don’t any of you see the problem with all of this?”
Brandon opened its wallet and looked up at Sean. “Of course I see the problem in all this.”
“Then why are we doing this?”
“Because I don’t get paid to solve problems. I get paid to collect hollows and deliver them to base.”
“Brandon,” Britt sighed.
“Bodies,” Sean said.
“What?” Brandon said.
“You get paid to collect bodies.”
“I’m not trying to be an asshole.”
“It’s true, Sean,” I interjected. “It’s just—if we don’t do it someone else will, so it might as well be us.”
Britt nodded.
“Let’s bury them, then,” Sean said.
“We can’t do that,” Brandon said. “And don’t pretend you don’t know why.”
“Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else in this country is afforded the privilege.”
“It would take too long. Besides, they want to resettle the place, not fill the fields with graves.”
“What if it’s what she wanted?” Sean said, gesturing at the baby. “What about her? Him? What if they were you?”
“I don’t get it,” Brandon said. “It was never a problem for you until now. What the hell is the difference!”
“It has nothing to do with the difference,” Sean said. “That’s what I’ve been going over in my head: how pointless and heartless and thoughtless all of this is.”
“But it’s necessary,” Brandon said.
“You’re right,” Sean conceded. “It is necessary. But that’s not my point. We spend our whole lives working towards something. We set goals and make plans and buy houses and make babies and then in a single second it’s all gone and you’re nothing but a hollow, an empty, a body in a house and all the things you worked so hard to get just disappear. And then somebody else buys your house and moves in and repaints it or-or, tears it down and it’s like you were never there. They make it their own and then one day they get old and sell it or they die. Yet here we are, the four of us, disposing bodies so we can have a house and an education and a family, so we can make memories and collect things that do nothing for us when we’re dead. What’s the fucking point?”
“I don’t know,” Brandon said. “It’s just something I think I want to do.”
***
After all of the bodies were cleaned out of the houses, the other units moved in to take care of the rest. The houses were emptied. All of the pictures and paintings, furniture, dolls and stuffed animals, TVs, and clothing were loaded into trucks and taken to meet their end in the insatiable belly of the incinerators. It took three more months to incinerate everything inside the houses than it did to clear them of the bodies, even with a significantly larger number of personnel. And it only took a minute for a hollow to become bone, an hour for the bone to become ash and, as the incinerators geared upwards and over a hole in the ground at the end of every day, a single second for the ashes to fall.