Excerpt from Unthinkable by Brent van Staalduinen

Excerpt from Unthinkable by Brent Van Staalduinen. Copyright © 2024 brent Van Staalduinen.

Published by at bay press. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Brent van Staalduinen. *Unthinkable.* At Bay Press. $24.95, 350 pp., ISBN: 978-1998779246

So. Reduced to this.

Five and a half pounds of what most people call ash but is in fact a coarse powder largely composed of pulverized bone. Or, according to the greasy funeral director, approximately one cubic inch for every pound of Deceased Loved One, contained within a box measuring eight by six by four inches. With some room to spare.

Neil’s crushed bones were in that box. I’d found him almost three weeks before, face down in his bed, a tiny and almost bloodless hole at the base of his skull. No sign of a struggle, just the rank odour of shit filling the room—in that final, infuriating indignity, his bowels had voided themselves at the moment of his death. It had taken every ounce of my will to keep myself from cleaning him up before the Mounties arrived to investigate.

The funeral director, an obese man in dirty, stretched jeans and a t-shirt that might once have been black, tucked the urn under his arm and held out a hand. There were dark smudges and lines on his sweaty palm, and I was distracted for an instant by who that ash might have been, before bringing myself back to the present.

The fucker wanted more money.

“We had a deal,” I said.

The funeral director shrugged. Small bits of something weightless drifted from his shirt. Someone, perhaps.

“Maybe your Loved One weighed more than you said he did,” he said.

“Maybe?”

“Maybe I needed to use more fuel.”

“I paid upfront.”

“Everything costs more these days.”

More than I could afford, given the state of things, but Neil had insisted. His last will and testament, kept in a shoebox above his stove, had contained the legalese terminology for what needed to be done with his remains and his estate—all left to me, such as it was—but the accompanying note, brief and written in his halting hand, had sounded more like him.

Burn my sorry ass, Lorry. And bring me back to Barren Arm. N.

So I had. And now I was being gouged for honouring that final request.

“Give me the urn, you criminal,” I said.

I could smell that fat, entrepreneurial bastard. Like the rest of us, without electricity to power the machines that had formerly helped define our cleanliness, he now did his clothes by hand, but his rankness was a unique mix of sweat and urine and unwashed ass. With the slightest whiff of cologne, no doubt a tiny, rationed ritual from his former life. In the confines of the chapel, the effect was nauseating.

He smirked and turned away. “Come back when you’re ready to pay, missy. I’ll keep your boyfriend safe.”

Missy? Fuck, no. I gritted and spoke between my teeth. “Wait.”

He faced me again with a self-satisfied smile. He thought he had won the transaction. You arrogant prick, I thought, moving towards him. You have no idea what’s about to happen. The thing about arrogance is that it blinds us to everything most important. And for him, what should have been most important in that moment was that I, all six feet of me, was quicker and stronger than he was. Why are people so bad at assessing others? What possessed an overweight extortionist to imagine that he had leverage in this situation? In a blink, I had him pinned against the stainless face of his own crematory, my thumb and index finger digging into his mandibular angles. I was a combat medic for seven years, and a special ops operator for a decade after that, so I had skills that went beyond first aid. You can change a person’s chemistry with the right pressure.

He was experiencing two things. First, the pain. His eyes went wide, and his mouth carped open and closed. His limbs twitched, useless, from the sheer volume of agony he was experiencing. Second, the fear. He had no idea what was happening or where he was or what would happen next, and there’s nothing more frightening than removing all sense of certainty. In a word? It felt like the end. You can keep your waterboarding and sleep deprivation—I broke them all by removing every touchstone of their existence.

With my free hand, I took the urn from under his arm. “Should I kill you?” I whispered into his ear. “Or just turn you into a vegetable?”

“N-n-n-na-na-ngg—”

leaned in even closer.

“Remember me.”

I dug deeper and his nervous system stuttered, forcing him to collapse. On the ground, he tried to reach up to his jaw, where the pain was, for comfort, but his arms wouldn’t respond—the sudden, extra pressure I had applied had kept his nerves firing uncontrollably. He wouldn’t move for a while.

I walked out of the funeral home chapel through the side door. It banged hard against its frame, twisted out of true by the Unthinkable’s impossible physics. The home’s stucco walls were cracked and sagging, almost leaning into the street. Most of Port Chastity’s buildings bore similar scars, patched together with precious building supplies and shored up with saplings from the bush after the lumber from the mill ran out. The ones that had remained standing, that was—the rest fell as hard as the ground did when the earth heaved.

Outside, in the blinding June sun, adrenaline coursed through me and I began to tremble. I saw every throat I’d ever abused and choked—how easy it became. The killing, too, when necessary. Rote, we called it when things got so bad on deployment that we had to let every feeling go. We went rote to accomplish the unimaginable. Went rote when we saw those above us doing what we knew to be irredeemable. For me, there was no Hippocratic oath, and the Geneva Convention assumed a kind of honour that had long been absent in war. My first, under a half-collapsed mosque in Kabul twenty years before, was some fanatical fucker who’d made an art of blowing our troops to shreds yet who knew remarkably little. Couldn’t detain him. Couldn’t send him back out. How silent the end can be without breath.

I turned my face towards the sky, closed my eyes, and breathed long and slow, filling my bloodstream with extra oxygen. I relaxed my muscles one area at a time, toes, legs, hips, core, shoulders, neck, face. Yet my hands still shook. Do it again, Soldier, said a voice in my mind, in the rough Glaswegian brogue of my first self-defence instructor. Until you’ve got your control back. Until you can function. Slowly, my body and mind regained their equilibrium and my thoughts opened up, cast back to the pathetic figure I had just left on that cold tile floor.

Damn, I thought. Damn, damn, damn.

It had been a long time since I had felt myself move like that, yet the violence returned on demand. As always. There were times I truly believed that I’d buried that old medic, but her resurrection was perpetually nearby, as though I hadn’t made the grave quite deep enough.

Brent van Staalduinen is the award-winning author of the novels Nothing But Life, Boy, and Saints, Unexpected, as well as the story collection Cut Road. Accolades include the Kerry Schooley Book Award, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and numerous other awards. A recovering librarian, reformed high school English teacher, and long-ago army medic, Brent now finds himself mentoring writers, cheering for Forge FC, and wandering Hamilton’s streets looking for stories.