We packed picnics—Ritz crackers and grapes, bottles of Coke—and sat among the dead: a beloved beagle who was now chasing balls in heaven, an 18-year-old calico gone too soon. Graves were marked with lacquered photographs and poems, cracked and yellow from the sun. Someone had buried a horse. Its tombstone was a life-sized thoroughbred reigning over the smaller beasts.
This was pre-Stephen King, pre-zoning that would prohibit a pet cemetery in the middle of a subdivision. Once we saw a funeral for a German shepherd. The owner—a teary middle-aged man—peeled back a plastic garbage bag to reveal a stiff head and open jaw.
I thought of the science experiment from class: our teacher dipped a goldfish in liquid nitrogen, then shattered it on his desk, orange bits scattering like glass. The boys laughed. In that brief moment of shock, I darted to collect the shards and reassemble them like a puzzle—or a memory. Then the teacher asked for a volunteer to scoop the pieces into the trash.
Erin Murphy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Brevity, Memoir Magazine, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She is author or editor of eight books, most recently Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (SUNY Press). She is a professor of English at Penn State Altoona.