The Coffins of Little Hope. Timothy Schaffert

that little girl smoke for days.”

      When dead birds showed up in the decoratively rusted cages so many had propped in their gardens that summer, people began to accuse Lenore. Some even claimed to have seen her slipping in and out of shadows with a leather satchel full of the corpses of swallows.

      And within one week, when you Google-imaged Elvis, the first on the list was not the king of rock-and-roll but rather the police artist’s sketch of Lenore’s presumed abductor. The sketch artist, a local, had been previously criticized for his elaborate portraits, his artistry overwhelming his work, creating images so detailed that all you remembered was the picture, not what lowly criminal the picture might represent. For Elvis, he practically stripped the man of all individuality, creating a blank slate we could endow with any number of distinguishing marks. We could see that face in nearly every man we met, and the sketch provoked all sorts of erroneous sightings.

      And our paper, the County Paragraph, conspired with our community, dignifying every slim possibility by weighing its potential for fact. Even the slightest bit of scrutiny managed to give the most unlikely scuttlebutt legs and longevity. People everywhere wanted news of Lenore directly from us—we gained subscribers from across the country and around the world, even in cities where they didn’t speak English. People trusted us for our folksiness—we seemed too good-hearted to traffic in lies. It was an absurd notion, of course; small towns historically have thrived on weaving tall tales—villages are easily taken in by sideshow promise and religious ecstasy. A potato with the profile of Christ bleeds from an eye, and the farmer who dug it up will go to his grave defending its holy implications.

      Though, as you already know, I never published Lenore’s obituary, my obituaries nonetheless developed what could only be called a cult following. People, no matter how far away, seemed to love to read about our local dead—they loved taking measure of such tiny lives and loved to think of me as a little old lady with a dark passion. They could just picture me in veils and ribbons and widow’s weeds, high on hemlock tea, it always winter out my window, my skeleton’s fingers rattling at my typewriter, writing my death sentences. I paraded before them a necropolis of folks who might’ve been worth their knowing: Mrs. Lacey Norris, the hospital volunteer who crocheted caps for years and years of newborns, who went ass-over-elbows down a long flight of stairs; Mr. Benjamin Lake, inventor of an innovative coyote trap, whose night sweats proved more dire than just the consequence of too many quilts on the bed; Mrs. Helen Law, glassblower, smoke inhalation; Mr. Weston Ansley, insurance, natural causes; Mrs. Geraldine Speck, Autoharp enthusiast, bone disease; Mr. E. A. West, organist, lungs; Mr. Nelson Barnet, grocer, kidneys; Miss Ellen Maxwell, jeweler, blood.

      And I’ve been condemned for having this career at all; I’ve been addressed, in letters, as Morticia and Vampira and Queen of the Dead. I’ve been accused of taking fiendish delight in mortality, capitalizing on loss.

      Who will write my obituary, and what will it say? How could it possibly be anything but superficial and inadequate? Don’t I deserve, for having written thousands of obituaries, to have one that’s better than any of those thousands I’ve written? Is it so much to want the last sentence of my obit to be written by someone of genius? I want my obituary to win awards, to be published in textbooks. I want future obituary writers to say, “I knew I wanted to be an obit writer when I read so-and-so’s obit of S Myles.” And when the writer of my obituary dies, I want her obituary to mention mine.