Klay set the sack on the floor and lay back on the bed. He put his arm over his eyes to block the fluorescent bulb. After a moment the scenes began. Sehlalo’s ankle pistol in his hand, the disbelief on Tenchant’s face. Then Hungry, blood-smeared, kneeling beside her fiancé’s body, folding the blue windbreaker into a pillow and placing it gently under Sehlalo’s head. He watched her wipe the blood from his face, straighten his collar, and adjust his arms and legs. She crawled to Miss Minnie and did the same for her, and then to Miss Edna doing what she could to give the dead their dignity.

He’d watched people tend to corpses thousands of times. They straightened eyeglasses, fixed neckties, picked away bits of makeup, adjusted stray hair. They leaned into caskets and kissed the dead on the forehead, the cheeks, the lips. They spoke to them.

Klay had seen so many dead he couldn’t remember his first, but he didn’t understand it. A corpse was not a person. It was a thing—an abandoned thing, no more worthy of sentiment than was a dead person’s shoes or toothbrush. His view formed on the morning of his mother’s funeral. “This is life, Tom,” his father had explained, standing in the doorway to their funeral home’s main chapel before approaching her. “And this is death.” Jack Klay switched off the light and darkness filled the room. “Death is always present, but death is afraid of the light.” His father switched the light back on. “Your mother was a light.” He squeezed Klay’s hand. “You are a light, Tom. But when a light is switched off, the world is back to its natural state. Do you understand?”

Klay said he did. He took from the lesson a message his father had not intended: if the fundamental state of the world is darkness, it is foolish to grieve. He did not want to be foolish. His mother wouldn’t like that. And so to honor her he swore he would not cry at her funeral. He would not mourn her, or anyone. It wasn’t easy to do. He trembled beside her closed casket, knotting his toes in his shoes and squeezing his stomach muscles. He bit his tongue so hard it bled. From then on he practiced. He said goodbye to his first dog, Shelby, with some tears, but to the next, Brutus, and to two cats without any at all. He was dry-eyed as he pulled socks up over the dead feet of Julie, his motorcycle-riding neighbor, whom he’d had a crush on. He was emotionless holding his grandmother’s fluffy-haired head with one hand while he repositioned her plastic head block with the other. He was steady as he embalmed Little Victor from the neighborhood.