I watch my daughter ready herself for the funeral. She smears on white foundation and black lipstick, the way her friend taught her to. Every time that girl came over, they’d practice dolling each other up in lacy dresses and ghostly face paint. I don’t know if it’s called Goth anymore. Mariam used to laugh every time I asked.
Now, she gazes into the bathroom mirror. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Even when she was little, I would never know she was upset until she started bawling.
She turns to me, and I can’t help but flinch at the dour, corpselike mask she’s laid over her face. I only let her wear her uncanny makeup around the house. Never to school, and certainly never to church. “Sweetie, that’s not appropriate,” I say gently.
Mariam’s eyes are stained glass. “Lilith liked it.”
I am helpless. I say nothing. Not then, not in the car, and not really when I shake the McCalls’ hands and whisper condolences. The father’s paired his suit with hunting boots. He looks twice at my daughter, but when he sees past the makeup and black clothes to the face underneath, he crumbles.
The service drags. Mariam stares at the ground. I whisper the prayers extra fervently, for both of us.
Beyond the soft meadow-grass of the graveyard and chapel, the forest looms and observes. After the burial, the girl’s family hovers around the grave. I draw Mariam to the outskirts of the plot to give them privacy. The mother shoots us a vicious glance on the way, as if my daughter was the bad influence. An aunt says how lucky it is that their Kylie never got to dye her hair like she wanted; at least she died pretty and blonde. I didn’t look in the casket. I wonder if she was buried in her own clothes, or if they borrowed some cousin’s sundress.
As dusk thickens, the McCalls drift away to grieve in their own quiet homes. I should bring Mariam away from the cemetery, too. But she’s placid, and I can’t move. We are monuments like the tombs surrounding us.
“Do you want to lay the flowers down?” I ask. I bought roses from the grocery store this morning while Mariam was still in a state of insensate, half-asleep mourning. They seemed Gothic enough for her friend’s tastes, even though I selected the soft pink ones instead of blood-red. For the family’s sake.
“They wrote the wrong name,” she answers. “It’s Lilith McCall. Kylie sounds like she plays sports.”
How do I explain that this girl’s family wasn’t going to inscribe a demon queen’s name on her headstone?
When I was thirteen, I insisted on being called Artemis. Goddess of the hunt. Though I grew out of it after enough of my brothers’ mockery and my youth pastor’s pointed sermons on the sin of paganism, my conviction ran deep. Telling strange little girls that they’re doing something wrong is difficult. It’s easier to brush their interests off entirely, until they shed their personalities like a dried-out skin and become someone new.
No one likes to admit this, but strange little girls die the same as everyone else. Some of them never get a chance to grow out of it. Her best friend is in a coffin, but my daughter’s the one on the other side of a veil. I’m bunching fabric in my hands, but I can’t get through to her.
“The flowers?” I prompt, but she shakes her head.
“I know what to give her.” Mariam opens her purse. There’s a flash of sallow bone-white, and then a deer skull is cupped reverently in her hands.
“Jesus Christ!” I say, even though we were just in a church. “Sweetie, where did you get that?”
“The woods. We found it.”
It looks ancient, bereft of flesh, its hollow eye sockets gaping like abyssal windows. It looks like a disease waiting to be caught. And in the early moonlight, my daughter is ethereal.
Ideas I abandoned long ago rise to my mind: an immortal goddess, and the deer she hunts. A child dreaming of being something otherworldly. Her hands tremble on the awful skull, and for the first time today, Mariam starts to cry.
“We were going to cast a spell with it,” she admits. “I don’t know what it would’ve done. Lilith said she’d tell me when she figured it out.”
I rub the heels of my hands into my tired eyes. A spell. Of course. “If you do this, her family is going to think it’s witchcraft. This is not normal.”
She sniffles. “Lilith hated flowers.”
The girl I used to be remembers, and aches. There is nothing I can do for my daughter but tell her what I’ve learned.
“No,” I say, finally. “I’ll leave the roses. We can’t scare the McCalls.” I’m sorry, I almost add. “Lilith would understand if she’d been older. Graves are for the people who are still here to see them.”
On the car ride back home, my daughter holds the deer skull in her lap. As she washes off her spectral makeup, she places the skull by the sink. At midnight, I rest my head against her bedroom door and watch her sleep with her arms around it, pressed into the crook of her neck like a stuffed animal. Like a best friend.
This story was originally published in Deertopia: A Horror Zine.