The Mortician's Daughter

She had been too young to remember her mother’s murder but that doesn’t mean she didn’t hear stories about it or read about it in the newspaper clippings that her father had stashed away in the attic.

When Carolyn was three years old, her mother had been brutally murdered by a man who got away. The man had never been identified. To this day, almost fourteen years later, Carolyn has secretly been in search of the man who murdered her mother.

She never told anyone about it. She didn’t really have any friends. And if they knew, they would start to make up rumors about it. They would say she had murdered her mother or her father had done it or they did it together. All the kids at school would start making Lizzie Borden jokes and start calling her that in the hallways. That was one thing she didn’t need in her life. When she was in elementary school, she had told all her friends about how her father worked with dead people. At the age of 6 years old, she didn’t understand what her dad really did but it sounded cool. All the kids at school thought so, too. She had a lot of friends growing up because all the kids were interested in what her dad did as a job.

“Do the people come back as zombies?!” Some of the boys would ask.

When they got to high school, everything changed. All her so-called “friends” had found out what a mortician really did and they thought it was weird. They all made fun of her for being different. She was different, but she didn’t think she was that different because of what her dad did as a job. The kids at school obviously thought otherwise.

It didn’t help her situation when they all found out where she lived. Carolyn lived with her father on the outskirts of town. Only the outcasts lived on the outskirts of town. They lived together in an old, small, black cottage with a cemetery behind the house dating back to the early 1700s. Carolyn thought it was cool but obviously the other kids at school didn’t.

They ridiculed her every day. They called her names: freak, loser, queer, outcast, emo, anything you could think up. But she was shy, and didn’t say anything to anyone. She just let them call her names and laugh at her every day. And then every day after school, she would walk across the brown, dying grass to her front door. Her father was usually never home when she got home from school. She would tread quietly up the creaky old staircase to her small room at the end of the hall.

Her home was the only place she felt safe. She even felt safe in the cemetery behind the house. She never wanted to leave. Every time she left her house, she was ridiculed. It didn’t matter where she went. Someone was always making fun of her. She was beautiful, but beauty didn’t matter if you weren’t popular. If you were a nobody, no one cared.

Carolyn always thought that this is how things would be for the rest of her life. She couldn’t go anywhere without someone making a stupid comment about her father’s job or how she was a freak. Nothing could have prepared her for what was about to come next.