Shadows Have Gone by Lissa Bryan

surgically removed and replaced when the battery starts to die.”
    Could that have been what happened to her? Miz Marson would have known there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it.
    Carly used her shoulder to scrub tears from the corner of her eye as she carefully bunched up the wedding dress skirt so they could slide it down over Miz Marson’s still form.
    “She was in her eighties, you two. There could have been other health issues we didn’t know about.” Mindy lifted Miz Marson’s shoulders so they could work the gown down over her head and slip her arms through the sleeves. “That’s just the way life is sometimes. But I feel like it’s a certainty, if you’d asked, Miz Marson would have said she’d rather go suddenly like this than to linger in sickness or pain with something we couldn’t treat.”
    She knew Mindy was right, but it still didn’t make Carly feel better. She felt like she should have noticed, should have known something was wrong.
    The gown still fit Miz Marson, though it was a bit loose. They laid her back down, and Carly took the curlers from Miz Marson’s hair and brushed it, then took a damp cloth to remove the bit of blood from her nose. When all of it was done, she put coins on Miz Marson’s eyelids to keep them closed. She wished there was another way. The coins over her eyes gave them a round, cartoonish appearance.
    Mindy scratched her head. “Should we give her any makeup?”
    “Miz Marson doesn’t wear makeup,” Carly said.
    “I know, but she looks so . . . bruised.” The livid purple mark where Miz Marson’s face had laid on the floor was startling.
    Carly thought back to the funerals of Before, the dead pumped full of chemicals and fillers, painted with makeup and laid under pink-toned lights to look “natural,” as though they were merely napping. Miz Marson wouldn’t want all that artificiality, even if it were possible today. “This is death. The days of sanitizing it and trying to disguise it are over.”
    They had finished. There seemed to be nothing else to do. Carly watched as Mindy settled in a chair over by the vanity table. “Where did Justin go?”
    “He and Kaden are making the coffin. He thought you’d want one.”
    Justin had taken up woodworking the winter they had stayed in North Dakota. He’d built Dagny’s crib himself, banging and cursing and trying over and over until he could figure out how to work the wood using primitive tools he’d scavenged from a local museum. It was one of those skills they needed to relearn now that they could no longer rely on technology. Carly thought back to Before, when her friend Michelle had a baby. Carly had blithely ordered baby presents from Amazon and had them delivered in just a few days. But the Internet had ended with the Crisis, and so had the electricity to run it, and mail delivery. Now, what they couldn’t scavenge in abandoned stores, they had to make themselves. It was as though the clock had turned back to the nineteenth century, and none of them were truly prepared for it.
    The crib Justin had made for their daughter wasn’t a work of art. It was a work of love. Simple yet sturdy. He’d spent countless hours sanding it to make sure the baby couldn’t get a splinter. Carly knew he’d put the same dedication into anything he made for Miz Marson.
    They sat around the room on chairs that Veronica brought them. They didn’t want her helping with the body—they didn’t have to discuss it. It was just something they automatically rejected as being beyond her age. So they sent her on errands, such as fetching chairs and making them drinks, gathering up candles for the parlor downstairs and preparing for the funeral to be held there.
    Carly used an old magazine to fan herself and shoo away the flies that came to the body. This was an old-style wake, watching over the body while the other preparations were made.
    She thought of Juneau, that empty city of the dead, and her parents, lying