Gas lamps hiss. Moths flutter. One, too close, drops to the floor. Immediately, the insect's crushed beneath the boot of a man in a fine tailored suit. The undertaker. Deft movements bring him about his grim office. Long legs carry the man to a smock. Trimmed fingernails tie blood-stained cotton over imported wool. He floats like an angel amid tools to dissect the dead.

Inspecting his form in a long mirror, the man adjusts his lapels, tightens his tie, and observes with an unhappy eye the way his apron falls over his side. He brushes an errant strand of hair back onto his waxed head. This head drifts for a bit until the man's satisfied with his appearance, fully dressed and polished from cap toe Oxfords, to sparkling cufflinks, to engraved collar bar. Translucent lips draw up into a smile. The ghost of a man now sets upon his work.

"Good evening, Mr. Liam Macintosh," the undertaker grins. The gruff, dirty, green, dead man stares up blindly from a table below. This vulgar thing that only hours ago sought to destroy a crimson flower is now lifeless and still, brought down by a single hole drilled straight through its brain.

The undertaker kneels beside the dead man.

"You've been causing me quite some pain," he clucks. "See, when decent men die, they leave enough money in the bank, under their bed roll, or in their pockets to cover their final expenses. But all you left was a tab at the bar." His eyes caressing the cadaver, the undertaker's hands, too, begin to roam over the cold form. "Even your gun and bounty aren't enough to pay for a hole in the ground. It leaves me wondering what I'm supposed to do. No man deserves to be put to rest alone in the desert, but when you don't lead a decent life, do you really expect your death to be all that different?"

The undertaker's hands withdraw from the corpse and wipe once, twice, and again against his smock. The man turns away. His spotless shoes bring him to a metal cabinet flecked with blood, and his hands skirt about its face for a moment before setting on their destination. Rows of precious, shining, sharpened things. Another brief dance as the undertaker's fingers maneuver atop gleaming instruments. He pulls scissors and tongs from the top drawer.

"Now, while the undertaker's never a popular position in the community, the things they say about us just aren't true," the undertaker tells the dead man. "We're a necessity." Coming back to Liam Macintosh, the undertaker's tools move across the length of his rotting frame. Starting at his boots, they snip and prod, inspecting pockets, crevices, and sown-up wounds. The undertaker pops buttons and slices through Liam's patchwork clothes. He pokes. He pries. He searches. And after a matter of minutes, having reached Mr. Macintosh's head, the undertaker's scissors trace the pockmarks along his jaw. The undertaker separates the dead man's lips and opens his mouth. Two gold teeth. A grin rolls up the undertaker's face. "And we're smart."

Reaching in with his tongs, the living man starts to pull. Stopping suddenly, he shuts the dead man's eyes.

"Where are my manners? You may not want to watch."

-

Shit-faced cowboys stagger about the street outside the Guinevere Hotel. Laughing, singing, and grinding against a blonde hostess, they don't notice as the woman picks their pockets dry. With a wobbling gait, Lourdes enters into this night. He swerves around vomit and piss. He dodges a swarm of flies devouring feces-splattered sand and men no longer able to find their feet. But his own steps not sure, he's unable to avoid the Guinevere's blonde hostess as she falls atop his chest. She wears chaps and a duster and barely anything else. She purses her lips and runs her fingers across Lourdes's hips. He pushes her away. The boy stumbles with the drunks.

Lourdes passes a bar, a bank, a bar, a general store, a bar, a bar, a blacksmith, a bordello, and a bar. Apart from the Guinevere Hotel, a collection of additions, expansions, and outcrops built one atop another without any seeming regard for taste, safety, or gravity, the town's buildings are simple things homely by day and lonely at night. Lourdes's eyes plumb the depths of the darkness. He sees the night things creeping through alleyways and trash pits, collections of excrement that far outnumber the town's buildings. Even the bars.

This place is but a few streets carved into the desert.

Away now from the Guinevere and deep into the night, the boy picks himself up. His feet controlled, Lourdes walks down the center of the street. He's not the slightest bit drunk. Lourdes's steps pass burned lumber and broken glass, and his eyes delve into the blackness inside this derelict hut. Black cats, rodents, and insects. A wound left to fester. A ruin. The town hall.

And then, the Guinevere's lights no brighter than the midnight stars, the boy crosses under a simple gate, a signpost reading Welcome to the Town of Heather. He looks at the sign's weathered letters made all the more murky by shadows suspended in the air. He pauses. He waits here for a long time. He just looks at the sign. No, he looks beyond it. Lourdes's vision stares into something ahead. From the moment he stopped, his eyes have been on something behind the firmament. Lourdes takes a step. His yellow eyes are the brightest stars out tonight.

These stars lead Lourdes across the sand, pulling him straight through dust clouds and rattlesnake nests. The boy's gait doesn't falter, and only when surrounded on all sides by darkness does Lourdes pause. The town is behind him now, and all around him are black rocks set indistinguishably against a black sky.

Here, at the end of civilization and edge of the desert, Lourdes stands amid tombstones. A cemetery. The boy scans over a chapel built in one corner of the land and heads the opposite way. There are no noises here, not even the wind nor the sound of animals digging up dirt. The only echo's that of Lourdes's spurs, chiming with his every footfall atop this silent earth. Obelisks, crosses, and square headstones stand crowded together, planted almost atop one another in crooked rows. Lourdes passes a freshly dug grave, an open pit without a headstone. A shovel, sunk into the soil, waits there. Ready to fill this plot as soon as someone – anyone – should die. More men and women sleep here beneath the sand than toil inside the town.

Lourdes keeps walking. He runs his fingers over every grave marker, simple and elaborate, wood and stone, until right against a meandering fence, he finds one he likes. It's an unadorned slab of slate with only the faintest impression of a name still lingering. Cassan... The tiny chapel is in the distance now and the vast nothing of the desert is but a footstep away. Lourdes collapses. Here, against the earth, he lets out a breath. The boy's eyes close, and his fingers stretch. Spreading over the dirt, he can still feel the sun, the day's warmth dwelling inside every last worthless speck.

His skin turns tight and translucent. Shrinking, it makes bones betray their age, and as if the grave giving way, he starts to melt into the earth. Lourdes smiles.

-

The undertaker wipes his hands at a wash basin. Crimson skin is restored to its pallid patina at the cost of crystal water. Yet, his fingers made clean, the undertaker keeps them submerged. They move about, and the water becomes opaque with blood. Polluted with pink. A ruinous red. The undertaker still scrubs, and the thick bloody puddle sloshes onto the floor. Lifting his slender hands now from the bowl, the undertaker cups something. Two gold fillings shimmer. Holding them up to the light, the man smiles.

A noise. Something in this house inhabited only by the dead makes a sound. Turning, the undertaker produces a scalpel and points it at the gloom. A thief? A bandit? A drunk? The undertaker's knife stares at a cat. The man's pet sits, happy and purring, pulling on Liam Macintosh's corpse. Liam's jaw's been broken and lips cut back, and inside his mouth is a pool of coagulating red. The undertaker's black and white cat bites at the spoiled meat that was once Liam Macintosh.

"Maxwell, stop that!" The undertaker barks. "Show some respect!"

With a flick of his wrist, the undertaker sets his knife free, the sharp thing curling through stale air until, inches from his pet, it slices into Macintosh's ear. A snarl. A hiss. The cat leaps, and the man goes back to inspecting his bullion teeth. After rolling them in his palm, watching them glisten in the thin light, the undertaker opens a drawer and adds them to a mound of fillings, watches, and rings. There's another noise somewhere in the darkness. This time, the undertaker immediately curses at his cat and keeps his eyes on his riches. His fingers drift through his collection, examining a necklace, a locket, pearls, earrings, and a gold fountain pen. The noise – a low, odd sound – poisons the air again.

"Maxwell!" The undertaker shouts. The man brings his eyes to the animal, but Max is sitting still. The cat simply sits and blinks. The cat yawns. The cat licks a patch of fur between its tail and its ass. Twisting the other way, the undertaker peers about the room, spying only shadows, until his vision comes back to Liam Macintosh. The body's unmoved. Still on the table. Still broken apart. Still, a shiver runs through the undertaker's form. Short half-steps take the man forward, and his eyes give the corpse the most furtive of peeps. His hands, trembling, reach for a gas lamp, turning up the flame as far as it will go. 

Only once the room is rendered stark with daylight do the undertaker's eyes delve into the cadaver. They spy nothing. With a laugh and a huff, the man turns away. The sound again. The undertaker shoots a succession of quick glances at his cat and all the corners of the room before returning to Liam Macintosh. Again, the undertaker's eyes detect only the normal signs of putrification. The sound again. Stiff ears lead the man to the ground, and there, dropped to one knee, the undertaker finds a pool of blood collected beneath the dead man. The sound again. A drop of blood splashes into the red slick. A quick sigh of relief. Another drop. But something with the puddle isn't right. Another drop.

Wrinkles appear atop the undertaker's powdered skin as he leans in. Blood doesn't drip from the cadaver to the floor. Blood drips from the floor into the cadaver. Red seeps back into Liam's veins. Nerves twitch across the undertaker's neck as he returns to his feet. He holds his breath. Slowly, he brings his vision up the gruff, dirty, green, dead man. Missing two teeth and with a hole in his head, Liam Macintosh opens his eyes.