Public Notice: Second Place, Short Fiction

Adah had spent the last two weeks wandering around the hospital but had never seen the mortuary, never once thought of where they would put her father when his bed on Ward 33 was finally empty. She had known it must have been somewhere in the gaggle of fruit vendors, healers, and pirate gospel music CD sellers that lined the outer grounds and hallways of the General Hospital, but the previous two weeks had passed in a blur only brought into focus by the late-night phone call. So when she walked down the roadway that connected Charlotte Street to Emergency and the lady selling nuts asked her, “How the old man?” as she handed her the usual—a pack of salted nuts wrapped in brown paper—Adah could only shake her head and say, “He gone.” She knew that she should feel something—he was her father, after all—but all she could think of was how he had made their lives miserable for years.

She followed the directions from the security guard and found the mortuary tucked away to the back of the hospital behind a tall, rusted gate with a broken padlock and a large sign:

Public Notice

The Services at the Port of Spain General Hospital Mortuary are Free of Charge. If you are asked to pay for these services, please report the person and incident immediately to the hospital administration.

The building was smaller than she had expected: two cobbled-together renovated shipping containers with heavy steel doors. There was a covered enclosure with galvanized roofing next to it, already full to bursting with women sitting on wooden benches. From the nondescript appearance of the building to the matter-of-fact sign at the entrance, it could have been any government office; if her eyes could somehow skip over the words “hospital” and “mortuary,” she could be coming to renew her driver’s license. She did not know what she had expected a mortuary to look like—cold chrome, perhaps, or starched white, like the hospitals on TV—but she had thought it would, at least, have a particular smell, something distinctly medicinal. Instead, it looked and smelled like the city that surrounded it—rusted gates, peeling paint, thick with the smell of car exhaust, the distant sewer, and urine from vagrants who pissed on the wall outside.

The irony that she was the person charged with identifying her father’s body was not lost on Adah. She had seen more of him in the last two weeks at the hospital than she had in years. Once she had grown up and left home, there had been no reason to rehash all the things that had gone wrong, no reason to do all the things the expensive therapist had counseled her about healthy confrontation, truth-telling, and healing. And once her mother had died, there was no reason for her to interact with him at all. What was the point anymore of saying to his face the words that had been hard-won on the therapist’s couch, “I am angry with my father.”

Adah wedged her body into the only remaining space on a bench among pregnant women with swollen eyes, old grandmothers with their hands clasped in prayer, mothers and daughters with faces pinched and drained like half-eaten oranges, and she wondered whether only women were capable of identifying the dead. A lady in a neatly pressed skirt and blouse caught her eye for a second and then looked away. She was sitting on a bench on the other side of the waiting area, her legs crossed sideways at her ankles ending in nude pumps, and her thick hair—streaked with grey and still in rollers—covered by a hairnet. Adah couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a woman wearing rollers and a hairnet. She looked as if the smallest action might be dangerous, like her own breath might tear her apart. It felt indecent to keep staring and so Adah looked away. She felt like an imposter among these grief-stricken women. Their worlds had...