Hobbies in the Afterlife
Tiny Hauntings Fiction
By MM Kaufman (Haunter) & Tiff M. Z. Lee (Architect)
Our family graveyard has an $8 entry fee. On summer evenings, the line for tickets gets pretty long with tourists, but at least there’s a guy around who sells amazing tamales.
“Yo!” he greets me. “Two pork, yes?”
“That’s right, thanks.”
“Coming right up. Nice to see you again, brother!”
When my mother donated the estate to the botanical society, her only request was that any current or future family members could be buried here. With that in mind, I appreciate what they’ve done with the place. Ivy climbs all over the grand tombs of Owen Sr., who built the original Twinkie factory, and his son Junior, who expanded the business to its peak. On the west side, roses grow between the modest graves of their mediocre descendants who lost that fortune, slowly but surely.
That’s where I will be, one day. I hope that ghosts can smell tamales.
Fifty years later.
Want the good news or bad news first? We can smell! But only rotting smells, ironic considering the cemetery is also a botanical garden. Sometimes the living leave food at graves and if the caretaker doesn’t clean it up, I have that to sniff. The tamale trash is a godsend. The Twinkie descendants leave–—you’ll never guess–—Twinkies on their ancestors’ graves, but those motherfuckers don’t rot! My kingdom for the smell of a rotted Twinkie.
Mom is always boasting from her mausoleum about her decision to donate the cemetery. Maybe we can’t smell the roses, but the droves of summer tourists (and the Halloween freaks) keep things lively. I never was a people-watcher in life, but now I live for it. Maybe live is the wrong word? But eternity requires hobbies. All I know is, the young kids really didn’t need to bring back low rise jeans.
MM Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine, Rejection Letters, JAKE, and forthcoming from Identity Theory. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman, her website mmkaufman.com, or at the carwash.
Tiff M. Z. Lee is a Canadian living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she contemplates fairytales and sea creatures. Her writing has been published in HAD, Your Impossible Voice, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She can be found online at tiffmzlee.com.
