Robert Ott loved westerns, especially the shootouts where stuntmen fell on airbags and no real blood and guts were left to clean up afterwards. He also enjoyed war movies where the explosions and battles produced the same faux aftereffects. He thought it would be cool to see a real dead person instead of one just lying there in the dirt looking like they were sleeping instead of having just been blown to bits.
Rob got his chance at ten when the church minister, a bony old man with a skeleton face, died of a heart attack. His little bowed legs couldn’t carry him fast enough from the Oldmobile’s passenger seat to the entrance of Howe’s Funeral Home and his first real meeting with the deceased. He remembered opening the door to a wide lobby, then two-timing it to the next doorway ahead—then being stopped frigid because that room was just large enough to hold a casket and he was suddenly thrust face-to-skeleton-face with the preacher’s corpse. All he remembered of the visitation after that was a sickening sweet perfume of bouquets and embalming fluid.
A year later his neighbor died of old age. Rob, this time traumatized, was pried from the Oldsmobile’s backseat armrest by his mother who insisted he pay his last respects and not be a bawlcalf, as she bawlcalfed herself while hovered over good old dead Fred’s coffin.
His young nerves were plugged back into the 220 socket; he tried to block the smells, but failed; he didn’t mind seeing the corpse this time, because he had his eyes closed tight. That night, he had his first dream of a casual walk through a cemetery, like it was a public park. He remembered a tombstone with the name Gunderson on it. The sex, birth, and death dates were obscured.
Three years later, Rob’s father died of cancer. His third nightmarish visitation at Howe’s was personal. He dared look at dear old dad for just a blink, photo-flashing only the light blue suit and his legionnaires cap he held in his waxy hands, proud to have served his country. That and mom up there rearranging the toupee he was branded to wear forever.
Growing into manhood, Rob began dreading going to bed at night because his once mostly benign recurring dreams of death had become scary nightmares of dead bodies blazing like birthday candles, or of his guts leaking out at parties after chugging bottles of embalming fluid while the other kids were chugging Boone’s Farm, or of a skeleton minister on a bloody Sunday morning rampage through Zion Lutheran Church.
Then came the horrific night terrors: shadow people lurking about; dreams of walking through cemeteries of open graves, the dead’s guts leaking out from too much embalming fluid. Yet, always around 3 AM, he felt a calming influence of a kindly-looking older woman hovering above his bed, nearly face-to-vibrant-and beautiful-face with him.
He then began to dream about attending this hovering woman’s funeral—foggy, disconnected images of the church packed with mourners, her children and family in the front three pews bawlcalfing their eyeballs out. She must have been deeply loved, he thought after being jarred awake by the alarm clock doing its annoying job. He staggered about, half dead himself, dreading another day, then another night tossing, turning, and thrashing once his day was done.
These out-of-body, somnambulant excursions continued through college—until his senior year and his final semester.
Rob was at a party when she thunderstruck him from across the room. It wasn’t her dimples and big brown eyes or her beauty or her body that slam-dunked him, although they contributed. It was her familiar face that suddenly flashed fifty years forward but still retained its vibrancy and calm. When she introduced herself as Jenna Gunderson he knew that he and her and their kids would have a long and happy life together. They kissed, then married. Robert Ott has had pleasant dreams and long nights of undisturbed sleep since.
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