The Brief History of the Dead

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Authors: Kevin Brockmeier
answered, “Two-thirty o’clock,” and her mother had said, “There’s no
o’clock
to it, hon. It’s just two-thirty,” which was why she remembered what time the appointment was supposed to be.
    She buckled herself into the car seat and waited for her mother to finish talking to the woman with the orange vest who stood by the front door in the afternoons. Laura and her friends had made an I-Spy game out of the orange vests: whoever could spot the most was the winner. She had noticed that there were always more of them on the days when the sirens went off than on the days when they didn’t.
    Only recently had she grown tall enough to see out the window of the car without rising onto her knees. As her mother climbed into the driver’s seat and the engine made the coughing and shredding noise it always made when it was turning over, she noticed an unusual thing. On the roof of the house across the street was something she had never seen before. It looked like a spinning silver pumpkin trapped inside a metal grate.
    “What’s that?” she asked her mother.
    “What’s what?”
    “That thing,” she said, pointing. “The silver ball on that roof.”
    “Oh. They have those all over the place. It’s a—” Laura watched the motions of doubt appear in her mother’s face as she began to answer the question and then realized she didn’t have the words. “You know, I’m not sure what it’s called. It’s part of the house’s circulation system. I can tell you that.”
    Earlier in the week, Laura had watched a TV program about the body’s circulation system. She remembered the image of a man whose skin peeled away to show his blood pumping through him, a loose basketry of red and blue vessels surrounding a large, throbbing heart. The connection seemed hazy to her. “A circulation system like for blood?” she was about to ask, when another car came hurtling around the corner of the parking lot, driving backward, and punched into the edge of their front bumper.
    The car scraped along their driver’s-side door, not grinding to a stop until it had lined up with them window for window, rearview mirror for rearview mirror, pressed against them as though it were backing into a parking space. Laura saw the driver pause and shake her head before she reached over to apply the emergency brake.
    Softly, as though she were simply commenting on the weather, her mother said, “Well, goddamn it.” Her face usually had a strange, almost strict expression when she was driving, but for the moment, at least, it was completely empty. She was one of those people who truly became beautiful only when they showed no sign of thought or feeling on their faces, like bright, blank flowers unfolding their petals in the sun. Later, after Laura had grown up and moved away, that was how she would remember her mother—as a woman caught in a lovely thoughtlessness.
    “Are you okay?” her mother asked her.
    Laura said that she was fine.
    Her mother lowered her window and motioned for the woman in the other car to do the same. The woman’s window sank away, taking a dim reflection of them with it. She said, “I’m having an unbelievably rotten day.”
    “So am I,” Laura’s mother said. “At least
now
I am.”
    “Like you wouldn’t believe,” the woman said.
    Laura’s mother began working a muscle in her jaw, but almost immediately she became plain again. “Listen, maybe you should pull forward and let me open my door.”
    “I can’t,” the woman said. “That’s one of the problems.”
    “What do you mean, that’s one of the problems?”
    “There’s something wrong with my car. It won’t pull forward. It will only go in reverse. That and my kid left his books at home, and the stationery store was closed.”
    “Then maybe you should
back up
and let me open my door,” Laura’s mother said.
    “Oh. Okay.” The woman released her brake and inched backward, scraping along the side panel of the car. She slowly drifted out

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