By: Tim Boiteau

While waiting in her unfinished kitchen for the coffee to percolate, Anna Debeer’s eyes tracked across the peeling corn-colored laminate countertop, over all the cardboard boxes brimming with gadgets and mugs and spices, when the dream she’d had the night before bubbled back into her mind in vivid detail.

She had been lying in a shallow box redolent of fresh-cut pine and could hear right next to her ear a scraping sound. Turning her head, she had seen the date and time etched into the wood floor, the numbers constantly shifting and updating themselves, carved fresh in real time. When she pushed herself up into a sitting position, a flash of pain shot through her palm.

A splinter.

Though she plucked at the jagged thing for some time, there seemed no end to it, until nearly a foot of stiff, blood-slick wood jinked out of her palm, a nerve ending unthreading from the mesh of her body.

Or a puppet wire.

Beside her she noticed another box identical to hers, and another beyond that, and countless more beyond those stretching in a line that vanished into the blue-gray distance. Mindful of the splinter and her aching palm, she had begun to crawl into the next box, when her eyes opened.

Now, as she ran her fingers over her palm, seeing no sign of stigmata, she realized what those boxes had been: coffins, thousands and thousands of coffins.

***

Anna slipped on her sneakers and fleece, and trod across the dusting of snow to the backyard toolshed. Though Thomas had kept the shed consistently locked for years, the padlock now dangled unfastened in the latch. He would have come out here for the fishing poles and tackle before the trip last summer, had been in a rush, forgotten to lock up. Maybe the key was still in the dock shorts he’d been wearing. She couldn’t remember what had happened to them, could only recall a plastic bag full of his possessions a police officer had handed her. She remembered the cool, glossy tingle of the unusually sturdy plastic, the translucent hairs on her arms standing erect with static, the crisp sound it made as she had clasped it in her hands, but the actual contents were blotted from her memory.

She tugged the light chain, illuminating the tidy but dusty collection of tools. Jigsaws, ripsaws, buzzsaws, these stood out to her clearest of all, and when she pulled one of them down from its hook, it tore softly away with a contrail of wispy gossamer.

A few pieces of lumber stuck out from beneath a table in the rear of the shed, not enough to build anything substantial with, just the fragmentary remains from one of Thomas’s carpentry projects. She dragged out an irregular trapezoid, ran her fingers over the grain, tapped it against the workbench.

“What are you doing out here, Anna?” she asked the handle of wood.

***

An hour later she was wandering through Lowe’s, overwhelmed by the choices in lumber—red oak, poplar, maple, pine, teak, alder—in various permutations of length, width, and thickness. The sharp bouquet of the wood cut directly to a memory of Thomas napping after sex, his neck coated in a patina of sweat and sawdust. Some mysterious, primal force had pulled her face up against him, and she had lapped at the grime with the tip of her tongue.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?” a thickset man in a blue vest asked her. Lumberjack beard. Neck tattoos. Vulnerable eyes.

“I’m making a box and wondering what type of wood I should use.”

“All right. Well, it depends. How big we talking?”

“Not sure.”

“What’s the shape? What do you plan on storing in it?”

“I don’t … well, actually, it’s not so much a box as a coffin.”

The man, Rowan, from his name tag, was unfazed, deadpanning, “Well, that simplifies things. Is this for a Halloween decoration or do you plan on using it, you know, I mean, like, really using it?” His eyes grew wide with meaning.

“I couldn’t tell you what it’s for.”

Rowan chuckled. “None of my business, got it.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to be rude. I really don’t know myself, but I do want to make something quality.”

Rowan nodded. “I feel you. No value wood.” There were face tattoos too, she realized, hidden within the tangles of his black beard which spread high up on his cheeks. Ink-dark diamond tiles metamorphosing into skulls. “Tell you what, though”—he pulled out his phone, and Anna glimpsed the wallpaper image of a metal band performing onstage, bathed in Italian-horror-cinema lighting—“I’m no coffin connoisseur. Maybe we should do a little research.”

***

It required surprisingly little wood to house the human body for eternity, she decided back home, having laid out the long boards of one-inch pine on a backyard picnic table Thomas had build her as an anniversary present.

Ten boards, which would split and recombine to contain roughly 35 cubic feet.

Shivering, she circled the wood counterclockwise several times, seeking the angle of attack, the snow-caked leaves crunching beneath her soles. The trees creaked in the cold wind beneath the pristine sky, the branches clattering, and with most of the foliage gone, she could hear the sweeping drone of interstate traffic from miles away.

“What are you doing, Anna?” she asked herself for the second time that day, brushing a stray wisp of sandy-blond hair out of her face.

At Lowe’s, she and Rowan had tapped through a number of websites and videos discussing coffin construction. Though it had felt like cheating to her, plagiarism, it was also 100% necessary, since she was lost on this wooden sea without compass or map to guide her. At last they had found a site that she could only describe as doomsday-prepper-cum-hipster, presenting a product that most closely approximated what she had seen in her dream. Neither casket nor hokey Count’s bed, but imbued with a frontier aesthetic. Rope handles. Straight out of a spaghetti western.

The words on this site, the elegantly tattooed hands in these images, and the blurry jeans and red plaid in the background were the master to her apprentice. The steps were clear—prepare the tools and work area, measure the wood, cut the wood, assemble the box.

She brought out the tools—eschewing power for hand—because some unspoken edict commanded that that was how this coffin would be made. There was a whiff of asceticism to the affair—isolation, silence, simplicity, manual labor. She pictured Zen monks polishing temple floors, cloistered nuns kneeling in prayer, an Amish horse and buggy rolling through the countryside—between sips of cold latte.

The process was full of hitches: banged thumbs, cursing, fingertip nicks, more cursing, errors in measuring and cutting, splinters (mercifully short), inefficient use of wood resulting in numerous little wooden cast-offs left behind, and moments of befuddlement when the bones refused to join.

After warming up inside with curried chicken salad, white grapes, and espresso, she pushed through until 7pm, pausing only once to flip on the backyard floodlights, the long, stark shadows evoking a staged feeling. Then with the idiomatic last nail in the coffin, the box from her dream had materialized on the picnic table beneath a dusting of fresh snow. She circled the final product clockwise. It was as imperfect and lopsided a coffin as she would have expected it to be, had someone informed her yesterday of today’s spur-of-the-moment employment, and she felt the familiar bittersweet, empty/full paradox that came with the completion of a creative project.

Leaving it out on the picnic table, Anna returned inside, her body stiff and frigid and aching all over, boiled up a pot of pasta, and enjoyed it with red wine and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian in front of a crackling wood fire, then slept the sound sleep of the exhausted.

***

The next morning, she woke without the maze of a dream to mislead her. Ablutions performed, breakfast consumed, she pulled out her laptop, resolved that today she would do some writing, but the first thing she encountered upon opening her computer was the website she had used to guide her through the coffin journey, the faceless digital master, and her adventure in carpentry from the previous day rushed back into the forefront of her mind. With it came an unexpected sense of embarrassment, as if she had been discovered performing an unseemly act.

Somehow up until that moment, she had ignored the ache in her lower back, the tightness of her forearms, the blisters of her thumbs and palms, the myriad cuts, but now she considered each in turn, puzzling over what they meant as a whole.

Her phone rang.

Mom.

This week’s call found Anna more distracted than she’d been in previous weeks, which her mother interpreted as a relapse into the depression stage of grief.

“I feel fine, actually,” Anna assured her, gazing out her dining room window at the coffin reposing on its picnic-bench catafalque. Across the lid a robin hopped, stitching the fresh snow with its needle-thin, decussate tracks.

“Nonsense. You sound now just like you did in August.”

“And you sound like you’re driving.”

“We’re on our way to Yoga Beans.”

“Your father’s here too,” her father piped up.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Come with. We’ll treat.”

“I’m busy today.”

“Busy writing?” her Mom asked.

“Sort of.”

“You should come. Eat, pray, yoga. There’s a cutie in our class. You should see the veins on his calves. Obscene, aren’t they, Paul?”

Her father muttered, “Yes, scandalous veinage.”

“Sounds fun, but I have plans.”

“Oh by the way, message from Maddie: please make ‘that mushroom thingy’ (her words) for Thanksgiving.”

“I’m not sure if I’ll be up for it.”

“You’re coming. Your sister is offended you have yet to see her new house. Just make sure to bring a ball of thread so you can find your way out.”

***

Instead of meeting the young man with the calves, she met the young man with the face tattoos at Lowe’s again, who was keen to hear about the success of her project. She opened her phone, staring for a beat at the wallpaper of Thomas standing in a field of lava rock, before tapping the photo app, covering the wallpaper with the photo of the box.

“Here,” she said, holding her phone out to Rowan.

He nodded in appreciation, giving his beard a wiseman’s tug. “How long did it take you?”

“Ten hours, but don’t tell anyone else that.”

He sniggered.

A half hour later she was lugging the new cache of wood, rope, nails, and screws from Thomas’s pickup to the backyard, then dragging the box from yesterday through the snow to the chain-link fence at the back of the property.

Then she got to work.

***

Thanksgiving found Anna at her younger sister’s modern glass retreat an hour north of the city. After a matronly squeeze at the front hall, Maddie gave Anna’s shoulder-length hair an appreciative flick and led her past a collection of sculptures resembling incorrectly assembled carpentry projects, and into the white-marble kitchen, where Anna sensed a conversation had just died. Hugs were passed around, a few awkward exchanges with Maddie’s trader husband Dale and his parents and a coterie of friends (including one conspicuous stag), then her sister inserted a glass of red wine into her hand and ushered her up a floating staircase for the grand tour.

“This is the purple room. Can you guess whose it is?”

Anna pointed at the niece dressed in pink, who giggled.

“And next we have the pink one.”

Anna pointed at the niece in purple, who also giggled.

She gave them souvenirs from her trip to Iceland with Thomas last spring, stuffed puffins which had nested in a bag in her closet for many months, and felt ancient in her hands. Though they violated the color schemes of their rooms, the children thanked her.

Once all fourteen of the guests had assembled before the impressive spread of food, Maddie said, “Daddy, please give us the blessing.”

There was an awkward moment when Maddie’s father and father-in-law both began different varieties of blessing, at which point Anna’s father bowed out, allowing the alpha patriarch to take over. He didn’t mention Thomas in the prayer—Thomas never came up the whole evening.

“This is interesting,” Maddie’s husband Dale said as he spooned a polite-sized portion of gray blob onto his plate.

“Banana made it. Just like she used to in high school. Tell us the recipe, sis.”

Anna swallowed her sip of wine, absentmindedly tapping a single nail on the massive live edge walnut table. Her hands were red with fresh calluses, dry and chapped from cold and labor. “One can cream-of-mushroom soup,” she croaked.

All eyes watched her.

“One can crispy onions.”

Dale’s father tore into a turkey leg.

“Salt … pepper.”

Dale cleared his throat. “Yeah, that all really comes through.”

“Oh shit,” Anna sighed. “I mean, oh shinola. I forgot the green beans.”

The children tittered.

“Well, I have a big announcement to make,” Maddie said with as much effervescence as she could manufacture. “I don’t know if everyone noticed that I’ve been drinking water all evening—”

“She’s pregnant,” the child in purple said.

Maddie shot her an exasperated look before quickly recovering. “I was going to wait till Mom’s amazing pies were served.” Anna’s mother, who categorically never cooked, looked confused for a moment. “But I just couldn’t wait any longer before I—”

“She’s pregnant,” the child in purple repeated, louder now.

Anna flinched when Maddie smacked her child on the back of her head in a gesture meant to come off as playful and loving.

“What the fuck!” the child said.

“Don’t!” Maddie grunted, then shifted back to everyone else, and sang, “I’m going to have a baby! Another girl!”

Everyone oohed and ahhed. Dale’s parents applauded.

“You mean we’re having a baby,” Dale inserted.

“No, I don’t, babe. I hate it when people say that, because I’m the one doing all the carrying,” Maddie laughed a chintzy laugh that clashed with the decor.

“But people usually say we,” Dale mumbled as loudly as he dared, shifting some of the air-fried mashed potato balls away from the spreading gray slime on his plate.

After dinner, Anna smoked a cigarette in her sister’s park of a backyard, crunching through the snow all the way down to the treeline, and found herself recollecting Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

The stag had taken Anna’s absence as his cue and joined her with his vaping pen.

“Dale mentioned you’re a professor of literature.” Custard-flavored mist leaked out of his orifices.

“On sabbatical.”

“What does a professor do while on sabbatical?”

“Hang out at Lowe’s mostly.”

***

A few weeks after Thanksgiving, she received an unexpected call from her father.

“Let’s do coffee,” he suggested.

“Don’t you have your Yoga Beans or whatever today?” Anna asked.

“That’s more your mother’s thing. I really just want to get out of the house.”

Anna hemmed and hawed. “I just can’t do it today. I’m pretty busy.”

“With what, writing?”

“Sort of.”

“You can’t give this septuagenarian thirty minutes out of your day?”

“How about next week?”

Thirty minutes later while she was out in the backyard measuring wood in the crisp air, Anna heard tires crushing the snow in the unshoveled driveway, and she met her father as he was climbing out of the car with muffins and coffee set inside the casserole dish she had left at Maddie’s house.

“I told you I was busy.”

“Oh, shove it and drink your damn latte.”

Anna accepted the drink, mind spinning with tactics to prevent her father from entering her house. “Maybe we should go out for brunch.”

“We got food and coffee right here.”

“Want to go for a walk?”

“No, don’t want to risk a fall. I need to sit down. Still not a hundred percent.” He patted his thigh. Then after a beat, he asked, “Well, are you gonna invite me in?”

“I think I’m coming down—”

But her father was already heading towards the front door. They entered Anna’s ranch and settled down in the breakfast nook. Her father surveyed the walls, from which the cabinets had been stripped, revealing the apple-blossom wallpaper from many owners previous. For the next few minutes, they padded desultory conversation with sips of coffee and nibbles of pistachio muffin.

Her father glanced into the backyard, then turned a puzzled look at his daughter. “What’s going on? You finishing the kitchen yourself?”

“No, the kitchen is staying as is.”

He grunted as he rose again, Anna too slow to help him up, then approached the window to get a better vantage of the scene. In the month since she had begun her project, her backyard had transformed into a lumberyard, several tarpaulin-covered stacks of quality pine atop palettes, while the boards she had been measuring were lying out on the picnic table just as they had been her first day working. The completed coffins were missing from the scene. “You know, I noticed your hands at Thanksgiving and didn’t say anything. So”—he turned back towards her—“what are you building?”

Anna puffed up her cheeks, exhaled slowly. “Can you make it down to the basement?”

***

“Jesus Christ, it’s the catacombs,” he said when Anna found the dangling cord in the center of the unfinished basement and shed light on the twenty-eight pale coffins arranged over the grimy linoleum. Some lay on the floor, one or two stacked on top of others, while more stood on their feet, the lids canted at various angles or fit snug into place. None of them contained anything but musty basement air and shadow and the serial numbers she had carved in their floors. “Don’t tell me you made these?”

Anna nodded.

“How?”

“With my hands and tools. Thomas’s stuff. Not to mention the internet.”

Her father limped in a clockwise circle around the room, his white hair transparent beneath the harsh glow of the bulb hanging just inches above his head. He paused here and there to lift a lid off one coffin and peer inside or inspect the angles of another one.

“You’re not a handy person. Never fixed a damn thing around our house.”

“No,” Anna agreed.

“But these are good. Well, this guy looks a bit wonky,” he added, pausing over one in the far corner.

“That’s my firstborn.”

“You build them out there”—her father pointed through the glass-block window—“and then lug them down the stairs by yourself?”

Admiring her own work, Anna leaned against the wall beside a water-stained box of Christmas decorations she had been meaning to bring upstairs. “I make them all myself, but I pay this guy from Lowe’s to come to my house every Friday to help me carry them down here.”

“Why?”

“They’re not heavy, just a little awkward to carry by myself.”

“No, I mean why do you make them?”

Anna shrugged, casting about for answers, her retroussé nose scrunched with confusion or distaste or a cognitive state she had no name for.

“Do you need to … see someone?”

“What, like a therapist? No, why should I?”

“It’s a little morbid, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, no, I mean, I find it satisfying, fulfilling.”

“You need to get back to the university, honey. This time off is not helping.”

“I will. Next fall.”

Her father shook his head and tried sitting on one of the coffins. Ann was pleased to see that it held up his skinny frame.

“Must be expensive, all this lumber.”

“Well, each one only costs about a hundredth of what Thomas’s casket cost.”

“How long does it take you, Mrs. Cryptkeeper? I mean, completing each one.”

“I’ve got it down to six hours.”

“That’s a good day’s work.”

Anna nodded, sipped her latte.

Her father knocked on the lid beneath him. A hollow sound reverberated. “And what’s the plan? You gonna sell these things on Etsy or something?”

“I wasn’t planning on it, no,” she said with a reflexive laugh.

“How many are you gonna make?”

“As many as I can, for as long as I can, until one day, when I wake up, I don’t walk out the back door, and into the shed, and pick up the tools, and take them out to the table, and gather the wood, and measure it, and cut it, and assemble the box, and drill the holes in the sides, and feed the rope through, and knot it—and complete the ritual.” Her eyes grew hot and moist as she spoke, her voice quivering.

Her father couldn’t look her in the eye when he asked in a tremulous voice, “Do you blame me for it?”

“No. Dad.” She wiped her eyes. “I don’t.”

***

Wood-grain stripes and rings of bone and ash.

Penciled lines, flashing steel carpenter’s square.

Clamp of the vise, first bite of the saw, seeking the rhythm of the pumping wrist, the swinging arm.

Rain of sawdust.

Friction-torn blister.

Pus?

Lubricant.

Rubber-grip screwdriver, squeaking screws, winking brass eyes in winter light.

Hammer jolts. Wood clatter. Vibrations absorbed by the shoulder.

White grime packed beneath fingernails.

Each piece fit, inspected.

The satisfaction of aching hands, an undertaking complete.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Sleep.

Repeat.

***

The backyard free of snow, flecked with bees and nodding blossoms, saturated with spring.

Rowan rang the bell at 7am, and the two of them had bagel sandwiches and coffee in the kitchen-in-transition while Rowan described some of the zanier moments from The Mummified A$$holes’ performance at a club the night before. He smelled like old smoke and beer and had dark circles under his eyes. Likely hadn’t slept. Inspired by Anna, he had taken to performing guitar solos with the aid of power drills and saws. She had even attended one of his shows in a cramped club downtown and met his bassist girlfriend Piper, but after bumping into a former student with alarmingly dilated pupils, she decided to cut the evening short. He never once asked about her, but always came brimming with weird anecdotes, clearly wanting to entertain. Still, when it came time to move the boxes, a somber air settled over both of them, silence the unspoken rule.

After the sixth box, however, when they were heading out back for the final one, he said, “Piper really digs what you’re doing. She wanted me to ask you, you know, for one. I’ll pay, of course.”

They approached the final coffin, the one she had just completed yesterday, an elongated hexagon just tall enough for Rowan to fit his six-three frame inside—same as all the rest.

“No,” Anna said with an abruptness that stung her young friend. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be so direct.”

He shrugged, lifting his end. “It’s cool.”

“Why does Piper want a coffin?”

Rowan rubbed his beard, his eyes darting, in search of a different answer than the one foremost in his mind.

“No, never mind. I have a better idea. You build her one.”

“Me?” he said as they both lifted their ends in concert.

“Yeah, you’re the one that works at Lowe’s. Use your many, you know, guitar picks.”

He laughed, turning his head as backed up. “No, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is your thing. This is who you are, not me.”

She smirked. “It wasn’t who I was four months ago when I copied someone else’s blueprints off the internet.”

“It’s just, I don’t think it would be authentic if I did it, you know what I mean?”

“I tell you what: what are you doing today?”

“Nothing. Just another show this evening.”

“Okay. Stay here. You make the coffin today with my wood and tools, and I’ll …”

“You’ll what?” he asked, glancing back to ascend the back steps.

“I’ll bless the proceedings.”

***

Directions for those who wish to perform the Rite of the Wood:

First is the Encircling of the Wood. Three counterclockwise revolutions consecrates the Wood as Holy Material and elevates the human out of the flesh and into the form of the Wooden Apostle.

Advancing to the next step of the ritual, she must now Measure the Wood, following specifications to within a 32^nd of an inch to assure the components fit together as snugly as possible.

From Measuring, she proceeds to the Cutting. Power saws are an acceptable method and offer the cleanest and most precise cuts. However, manual saws permit cleaner transfer of the soul of the Wooden Apostle into the Vessel’s components. Thus, the Apostle must decide between whether the Vessel is to be more perfect in physical form or spirit.

Next, comes the Assembly, a process that demands the full concentration of the Inner Eye. At the same time, if the pieces have been Measured and Cut with requisite care, they will speak to the Inner Eye in the semantics of puzzles, the grammar of geometry.

Last is the Unwinding out of the mode of ritual, the descent of the Apostle back into the flesh, performed with three clockwise circles around the Vessel she has created.

The Rite is complete; the Vessel is ready to receive.

***

It was towards the end of the year before Anna revisited the land of boxes, but when she climbed out of the coffin this time and searched the horizon, there were no more boxes laying in wait. Just the ground smoking and hissing and cracked in tessellated dream patterns. The splinter, preposterously long and looping over the boxes she had passed over like a coil of razor wire, snapped free from her hand, leaving behind a deep throb and the sense that she had not extracted it all.

Her eyes flickered open. She smelled the fragrant lumber and surveyed the dark bedroom-turned-funeral-gallery, coffins lining the walls, crowding the small room. She felt like moth glancing back upon the cocoon out of which it had eclosed. The morning tasted unsavory—all these dry husks surrounding her.

She was reminded of the day she had selected Thomas’s casket from the samples at the funeral parlor, cross-sections suspended from the walls with labels ranging from tasteful to ostentatious—The Avalon, The Golden Osprey, Sablewood, Diamond Peak. Throughout their relationship he had vacillated between a preference for cremation or burial, and had yet been undecided at the time of his death, leaving the choice before Anna. The idea of cremating his body hadn’t bothered her so much, but the idea of cremating his eyes, cremating his hair, cremating his hands … she couldn’t bear the thought, and so had selected The Franklin.

Her living room at this point had not an inch of free space, nor the dining area, nor the two spare bedrooms. The basement was jampacked, and as she poured coffee in the one free room of the house, the kitchen which only contained three coffins stacked where there had once lain a breakfast table—she gazed out at the backyard, the fifty-odd coffins that would not fit in her house and the pile of unused lumber, the waiting wood that she knew she would not be going out to consecrate today.

And not because it was Thanksgiving and she had promised Maddie to make her casserole again (this time with green beans) and watch the newest colorful child wobble around the palace of glass, but because she had no more boxes inside her.

At least not now, not today.

How many acquaintances do most people have? She wondered, trying to pull up the statistic from a cobwebby corners of her mind. One hundred fifty, two hundred?

She had far surpassed the mean, owning far more coffins than one person would ever need, more coffins than she had people in her life. Around the time summer had arrived, her efficiency had ramped up to the point that she could produce two coffins a day, and had on more than one occasion even constructed three, taking advantage of the longer hours of daylight.

She texted Rowan, who had not been around in a few weeks, informing him of her plan for the day and soliciting his help. Not only did he bring his pixie-zombie girlfriend Piper along, but also the other two alt-undead members of The Mummified A$$holes. The four of them, plus their various friends and family, all already possessed their own coffins, as Rowan, under Anna’s tutelage, and Piper on occasion, had come to learn the art of coffinmaking, but today, the thrashcore group took only one additional one, which they planned on painting in phantasmagorical shades and using as a stage prop.

***

FREE COFFINS, read the fresh-painted words on the wooden cross staked at the edge of her lawn. Lines of cars and pickup trucks lined the streets of Anna’s suburban neighborhood. The band helped themselves to beer and store-bought pumpkin pie while Anna surveyed the yard. Neighbors and strangers bundled for the chilly Thanksgiving weather paced the aisles between the standing boxes, as if exploring the pillared gallery of some ancient ruin, each one identical save the serial numbers carved discreetly inside. Five hundred was the last number she had carved, but the yard only comfortably accommodated forty at a time.

Sometimes the browsers would squeeze inside, ask a trusted companion for the lid to be shut, then emerge blinking, seeing the day through the fresh eyes of the living dead. Some families took several boxes (if they could manage), others only one, and some as if in denial that they would ever need such an impractical thing as a coffin left empty-handed.

As holes in the ranks of coffins opened up, one or two of the hands on deck would carry out a new one and stand it up with the lid leaning against the front, ready for the next taker. When she left to deliver her gray casserole to the house of colorful children, thirty-one coffins still stood in her yard, and when she returned that evening, stuffed but sober, it was completely vacant.

The next day, the giveaway continued with Rowan and Piper’s help. By Saturday her charnel house was empty; the “FREE COFFINS” cross came down.

Anna sat cross-legged that evening in the center of the empty dining-room floor and wrote the story of her experience, but even after building so many coffins and ruminating on building so many coffins and writing about building so many coffins, she still felt disassociated from what had happened. Not to mention dissatisfied.

“Maybe if I reach a thousand,” she told herself the next morning in the bare kitchen, the cabinets still stripped, the gadgets and mugs and spices still boxed. She was staring out at the backyard, between her percolating coffee and whatever else the day would bring. “Maybe two thousand. Or maybe the secret is that it just goes on and on. The coffinmaker eludes Death through intimacy with Him.”

With her home empty once more, the spirit of generosity ebbing, she felt more boxes stirring up inside of her, begging to be born.

And who was she to deny them?

###

Tim Boiteau is a Writers of the Future winner and author of The Nilwere (Grendel Press, 2024). His short fiction has appeared in Dread Mondays, The NoSleep Podcast, Deep Magic, and many other venues.