The Most Intimate Thing

It was raining the day I performed my first burial cleansing. I remember because it hardly ever rains in Jerusalem and because once you’ve cleaned a dead body and prepared it for burial, you can never unsee what you saw.

We’d gotten hung up an extra half-day and which made us late retrieving the body. Us meaning me, and my half-brother Harlan who’d recently turned seventeen. I was three years older, and the house, for better or worse, fell to us. As did our dad’s hard-used, one-ton Chevy flatbed with the homemade driver’s side running

The nurse pointed down the long hallway. “He’s in room 202.” She looked Elle over head to toe. “He told me he didn’t have a girlfriend.”