“No,” Margot tried to say. Her eyes opened. She was in the viewing room, surrounded by the sentry wall of coffins. Her parents’ caskets were ahead, beneath the only window, bathed in the soft light from a cloud-hazed sun.

The funeral director’s face was gone entirely. A smooth, fleshy sheen covered from his hairline to his jaw, unpleasantly flat. An empty canvas. No eyes, no mouth, but still speckled with faint crease lines and pores. The flesh didn’t move, but words came from him as he reached toward the casket lids. “We did our best, but…”

“No.” The word echoed in her head, but her lips refused to convey it. The funeral director’s face had been warped and erased by her memory, but every other detail was as realistic as it had been on the day. The pauses in their conversation. The waxy sheen on the caskets’ lids. The dry smell of dust and potpourri. Even the way her heart caught in her throat as she craned her neck to see inside the caskets. “No. No! No! No! Don’t! ”

She couldn’t stop it. She’d seen inside on the morning of the funeral, and now her mind replayed those images to her once again, as fresh and sharp and skin-crawling as they had been that day.

Two bodies lay inside the caskets. They had been posed in the traditional way: on their backs, hands folded across their chests, heads resting on low pillows. They were dressed in the best outfits from their wardrobes: a soft purple-and-white dress for her mother, a gray suit for her father. Their hair had been combed. Under their nails had been cleaned. Their faces washed and a layer of natural makeup applied to mask the deathly sallow color of their skin.

The efforts were all intended to make the bodies seem as peaceful and close to life as possible. Ideally, they would have appeared to be gently sleeping.

All efforts had been in vain.

The faces ahead of Margot were stretched, their muscles tight. Although their mouths were closed, their jaws seemed to be straining. As though they were trying to scream.

Their eyes were open. The corneas were cloudy, dulling the colors beneath into a flat sheen of gray. Her mother’s eyelids seemed to have been shredded, the skin around her lashes torn into strips.

“I…tried to close the eyes,” the funeral director admitted. “First with spiked caps under the lids to hold them closed, and when that didn’t work, I tried sewing them shut. But the skin was delicate. I’m afraid they tore—”

A spiral of black thread still clung to the edge of her mother’s left eye, its sharp end stabbing into the gray sheen below.

“Why’s their skin like that?” she heard herself ask. At the time, like in the dream, she’d felt numb and cold and sick.