Meetings & Yesteryears: “Like Red on a Rose” Chapter One, Part I
Chapter One
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Death and the Maiden
They’re the exceptional ones, those whose livelihood comes from corpses, coffins, and other thanatotic delights.
Rudella considers herself highly exceptional. And why not? She owns a funeral home. But we’re jumping far ahead of the hearse. Let’s start at the beginning, or rather, at the more interesting beginning. When she was a Goth, Korean girl living in Conyers, Georgia.
If you’re curious: “Rudella” goes “rue-DELL-ah”.
As you can imagine, not many Asians set up camp in the Peach State. The (un)subtleties as to why suited Rudella. She was, and is, naturally interior; in location and temperament. A little air-conditioning didn’t hurt, either. Neither did her piles of books and movies. Unless one fell on her, of course. Books came from the library on Green Street, where everyone knew her name, and mail-order catalogs. Movies came from her parents’ rental shop: Rewind or Die. That wasn’t a cheap pop for nostalgia, by the by.
Her parents knew the kind of world that was waiting to wreck their daughter with its horrors, so they loved her being an indoor cat. As long as she exercised. They were willing to raise a geek, not a statistic. Thus, everywhere she went, she went on rollerblades. Like running with rockets. Speaking of horrors, that was the genre she gravitated to, on page and screen. As you’ve so far seen, misery didn’t pull her to the macabre. She fell into those violent delights and ends by herself. She liked the boobs, too.
Morbid curiosity captivated Rudella in her teenage years and, once a week, she got to hang out in a morgue. Attendants are a notoriously lonesome bunch, so she was welcome once they knew she wasn’t going to… do things to the corpses. Months passed before they cracked and told her corpse cops didn’t exist.
It was a wicked sort of fun for Rudella, at first. The taboo nature of it all. She started off staring at the lifelessness, sometimes for an hour. The stillness intrigued her even two decades later. Where do you think she touched her first corpse? The head? The leg? Someplace indecent? Of the bits she could’ve touched under supervision, she did the awkward thing and chose the wrist, checking for an obviously absent pulse. It felt like raw chicken before her mother rubbed it down with gochujang and mayonnaise.
Then the crush turned into a like.
She ditched her high school graduation ceremony; she didn’t want to be paraded in front of people who didn’t give a fuck about her for four years. “High school sucks” twas ever thus. Her bargain with her parents was that she’d take a photo with them and her diploma in front of Pit and Twig High’s sign. Her parting gift was phlegmy team spirit.
During the congratulatory dinner, she broke the news to her parents that she wanted to be a mortician. They were fine since all those horrors took her to handling dead bodies instead of making them. She then broke the news to her parents that the school she wanted to go to was near Chicago. They were fine. Eventually.
The hardest part of leaving was saying goodbye to the family cat; Mur-Mur couldn’t know she wasn’t gone for good. She couldn’t take Mur-Mur, either. Inspiration struck, and Rudella left one of her favorite shirts, with her scent, for the lonesome cat to sniff and sleep on. She also recorded herself to a tape her parents could play whenever Mur-Mur turned wistful. Both worked.
Life went on, with all its undulations, ’til Rudella met a waitress who’d change everything.
Tubthumping
Separating stubbornness and strength through an odyssey of pain is a fool’s errand.
Under tasteless circumstances, Piri would be called a cyclops because she was born missing an eye. Her mother blamed the devil instead of her smoking, taking her frustrations out on her daughter instead of taking her daughter into her arms. Her father couldn’t do anything about it; a drunk driver made sure of that. The modern Polyphemus suffered acutely at “home” until what passed for her quinceañera, when she ran away and never looked back. Neither did her mother.
If you’re curious, “Piri” goes “PEE-ree”.
Everyone starts off as pieces in a void, waiting for circumstances to pull them into their true selves. No one is a fait accompli since constantly losing parts of yourself and (re)gaining others is the human condition. Or rather, should be. Piri is one of the fortunate ones, unless you know her circumstances.
To be continued…
