Laurent did his best to preserve my body, sewing the splits together and applying powder to my face as it became more and more discoloured, trying to maintain my identity as he was certain someone would show up to claim me. But after nine days, my body more closely resembled a stuffed pig than a pretty doll. Abdomen bloated, skin waxy and white. My eyeballs had dried out and my face, first bloated but then drained, was pinched, all life gone and the skin sucked into the angles of the skull.

On a Wednesday morning, bright and cold, my body was buried alongside two other unclaimed corpses, in the corner of a cemetery reserved for souls such as ours. Swaddled in cheap muslin, my remains were placed in a pine box that was lowered by rope and pulley into the ground. By the graveside: a pair of dirt-encrusted fossoyeurs leaning over their dirt-encrusted shovels, a handful of porters from the morgue (there to carry the coffins), the morgue clerk, and a priest in a black cassock with a battered bible and somnolent tone. There the company stood, together alone, while a couple of rooks made a nuisance of themselves in the lower branches of an acacia tree. There was just enough wind to pick up the bright- yellow leaves on the ground and send them tumbling past the men’s boots, and over the root-rough edges of the graves into the stillness and beyond. The pulleys whined and the ropes creaked and jacked against the pine box that contained my body, a satisfying and resonant sound. The box reached the bottom of the dark hole and, while the priest hummed the rites with great disinterest, the fossoyeurs, in deft and fluid movements, shovelled in the rich, black earth. The dirt landed at first with a percussive clop, which then softened to a crumbling, the weight on the coffin lid growing heavier and heavier still – everlasting.

Later, a moon three-quarters full. Autumn moon. White-blue light and long shadows. Three new mounds of dirt marked at their heads by small, unadorned wooden crosses. Beneath one of those mounds, I. Under all that indiscriminate weight, a cheaply made pine box containing my skin my blood my lungs et cetera.

And. That part about Axelle seeing me in the morgue? Wasn’t true.

She was never there.

41

Anouk

Toronto, 2015

Anouk sat alone in an unremarkable waiting room at the CF clinic, Sunnybrook Hospital. Her lungs felt like the barrel of a cement truck. She’d been coughing continuously for a week and her ribs felt bruised. She ignored the messages pinging on her phone from her mother, and also from a magazine editor who was expecting three thousand words on a Toronto artisan who had trained in Belgium as a master cheesemaker. She’d interviewed the artisan the week before and now all she had to do was write the thing, and she liked to think it was her fatigue that was stopping her, but it wasn’t. It was because the article was about cheese. And compared to everything else, compared to a pair of lungs that were on the brink, she didn’t care about cheese.