The man who came to town said that he was a “funeral director,” a title which meant nothing to us. He said that for years he’d worked in a place called a “funeral home.” In our town’s bar, he nursed pints of beer and said that he’d once been respected and creatively fulfilled. He said that he’d encouraged all clients to be bold and original, and that every ceremony had been “a unique expression of the deceased’s life and the personalities of the mourner.”

We asked him, “What ceremony?” He gave us a puzzled look. He asked us about funerals in our town. We told him we didn’t know what he was talking about. He asked us what we did with people’s remains when they died. He asked how we mourned and grieved. We told him, surprised that this needed to be explained, that we simply dumped the bodies in the ocean, since there was no need of them. The dead certainly weren’t using them anymore. And then we just grieved in our own silent, private ways.

He paused, apparently gathering himself. When he spoke next, he seemed bewildered and impatient, but also refulgent with the excitement of being allowed to speak on a favorite subject. He said that, where he had come from, and every place he had ever been, there were ceremonies called “funerals.” The deceased was placed in a wooden box, sometimes open and sometimes closed, and put up at the front of a large room. People gathered to mourn publicly, to give speeches in honor of the deceased, their life, their qualities. They shared notable or amusing anecdotes from the life of the deceased.

Then the box was ceremonially carried to a deep hole in the ground, where it was lowered and buried. A few more words were said, and the spot was marked with a large, engraved piece of stone. Sometimes there were receptions afterward. Sometimes the receptions were catered.

We asked him what the point of any of that was. He didn’t reply. Maybe he didn’t feel like explaining more, or maybe he had no explanation.

He eventually reiterated, as if we had inquired, that he was a unique type of funeral director. He didn’t want his clients to feel obligated toward all the supposed expectations of how a funeral should go. As the director and his clients became bolder, the owner of the funeral home became more dissatisfied, and eventually the director was fired.

“For example,” he said, as if we had asked for an example, “one family requested a glass casket to be installed above ground, with no embalming fluid in the body, so they could watch the decomposition over the following weeks, months, years. I sided with the family, and pretty soon I was out of a job.” He took another sip of beer. “You really just dump the bodies?” he asked.

We said that we did. We’d never thought to do anything else. We thought, but didn’t say, that his entire job sounded silly and superfluous.

“Sounds like you’re in need of a funeral director,” he said.

We disagreed, but we couldn’t stop him from staying in town. He got a job as a fry cook, and when he began asking for the bodies of the dead, we had no reason to say no. It was like someone asking for our garbage. We were only going to get rid of them anyway. He said he was a scholar of grieving rituals around the world, and he’d never heard of a culture that had none whatsoever.

“Have you ever heard of a Tibetan sky burial?” he asked. We, of course, hadn’t. He poured honey all over one of the bodies we’d given him. (We don’t remember whose it was. As soon as someone dies, their body stops being them. That’s how we’ve always seen it.) Birds flocked to the body and fed on it for days, until eventually it was just bones with flecks of gristle. The birds carried off these last pieces into the blue, presumably to feed their chicks and make osseous nests.

“Or a funeral pyre?” he asked. Neither of those words existed in our town until he arrived.

He demonstrated by piling up a bunch of kindling, then placing a corpse atop it. He used gasoline and matches to start the fire, which burned acridly for a long time and produced nauseating thickets of opaque black smoke.

In a follow-up demonstration, he made a pyre in the bed of a cheap wooden canoe he’d purchased, then set it out to sea. We didn’t like the look of awe in the faces of some of the town children as they watched the fire floating paradoxically on the water.

We disliked his demonstrations, and we told him so, but he just said, “Well, then, you don’t have to watch.” Unfortunately, he was somehow always in an obtrusive spot when doing his “work.” He buried bodies, sometimes in a “coffin,” as he called it, sometimes without any casing. He put seeds in and around one of the bodies and said that the person would be reincarnated as plant life. We marveled at his strange naïveté.

He even argued that our dumping of bodies in the ocean was actually a type of ritual itself. And to our annoyance, he tried to give us pointers on how we could make it more “ceremonial.” He delivered remarks about the tides as metaphors for the ebb and flow of life and death. He drew up designs for pulley systems that we could use to slowly lower bodies to the water, and ornate rafts that could carry the bodies out to sea. Our annoyance toward him grew in intensity.

One day, he hit upon a new idea and became virtually apoplectic with excitement. He talked to everyone who wandered within earshot about embalming bodies and posing them “like wax statues.” The upside of this ridiculous idea was that it absorbed him fully. He didn’t bother us anymore, as long as we gave him bodies. He no longer worked as a fry cook. We gave him everything he needed, and we let him live in an empty house on the edge of town. We made deliveries of food and other necessities so that he wouldn’t have to come into town and bother us. We even imported the embalming fluids and other things he asked for.

Over the years, this display in the empty field by his house grew. Sometimes he referred to it as a “human garden,” sometimes as a “life-sized diorama.”

He posed the dead as if they were still living, even managing to manipulate and freeze their faces in definite, permanent expressions. The first body he placed in the display was that of a man who’d loved to golf. He dressed it up in khakis, a button-down shirt, a sweater vest, and cleats. The gloved hands gripped one of the deceased’s own golf clubs, holding it aloft at the apex of a backswing. The empty, lifeless eyes focused on a ball and tee that the funeral director had placed. The effect was startling, and we didn’t like it. For the first time, we had difficulty separating this lifeless husk from the person it had once represented.

The display grew from there. Sometimes he created group scenes, like a picnic, or people playing cards. Sometimes he had individuals posed alone, like the aforementioned golfer, or the fifteen-year-old suicide whom he placed sitting under a tree, holding open a copy of Huckleberry Finn, the body’s face angled towards the words on the page.

Eventually, his pet project began to draw tourists. We’d never had money from tourism before, but the cost of that money was the intrusiveness. The funeral director freely told people of our disinterest in human remains. We’d never found this part of ourselves to be strange, but all of the outsiders seemed to. From the idle curiosity of passersby to the determined inquiries of academics, many people seemed to think we owed them an explanation. At first, we tried to be patient, but none of our answers ever satisfied them.

We considered running the funeral director out of town, but we didn’t have strong justification for doing so. He’d bought his house outright by then, not to mention that he’d indirectly helped to line our pockets. Still, we cursed ourselves for welcoming him in the first place. Some of us subtly suggested extralegal means of eliminating him, through violence or forced removal, but our consciences wouldn’t allow it.

By the time the funeral director reached his twilight years, the human garden was hundreds of people in number, and many young people in our town never knew a time prior to its existence. Nearly every aspect of our town had become reoriented around it. It was what we were known for.

But worst of all, our perspectives had become inextricably attached to it. The funeral director, through this monomaniacal project, had forced his viewpoint onto us. Whether he had done this intentionally or not, we didn’t know. But either way, we couldn’t help but feel that the dead were living in the garden, reincarnated in the poses and activities that he’d chosen for them. And now there was no getting rid of it. So many of us had become part of it, and now the rest of us would as well. For surely, when the funeral director died, someone would take over for him, add his body to the diorama, continue his work.

Before the funeral director’s arrival, we’d never thought about an afterlife. It seemed as irrelevant as the question of what to do with the bodies of the dead. But now we found ourselves reflecting on the idea of life after death. For the funeral director had created one, and we didn’t want to be a part of it. We wanted to fade into oblivion, not to be forced into a motionless, silent performance for all of eternity.

We wanted to retrieve our belief—held so passively and reflexively for so long—that death was the transition from life to immateriality. And yet here was the funeral director and his mad puppet show, freezing everyone into objects with the illusion of life. And none of us wanted to be staring out of lifeless eyes for the next thousand years.

We often wondered when the funeral director would die, but he just kept getting older, and the garden just kept getting bigger. It was like the project gave him purpose, which in turn kept him alive. Eventually, there was only one of us left—only one of us who had been there on the ill-fated day he’d come to town. Everyone else had only known our town as it was after his arrival. We could feel our end nearing, and we still hadn’t fully reconciled being part of the garden, so we did something desperate. We—the last one of the “we” who remembered the time before the funeral director—went to see him at his house.

He greeted us warmly and showed us inside. He served us tea and cake. Among his decorations and furnishings were a few of the dead townspeople, posed like guests or residents. We sat and talked with him, and very quickly we began voicing our reservations. We didn’t want to be part of a diorama.

He asked us what we wanted instead.

We said we didn’t care, as long as he didn’t preserve our body. Bury it, burn it, drown it. It didn’t matter.

We slumped back in the plush chair. We felt very tired and very old. Our flesh felt so loose on our bones.

We told the funeral director that we’d never liked him. We told him that we wish he’d never come to our town.

He replied he was sorry to hear that. He said his chance arrival in our town was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “How about this: What if I gave you a traditional funeral? Coffin, mourners, eulogies, burial, everything. No embalming fluid. The coffin will be completely biodegradable. You’ll be fertilizer in no time.”

We said he could do as he saw fit. As we finished our tea and cake, we tried not to think about what people might say at our funeral. At the funeral director’s invitation, we walked with him out to the garden and looked at a few of its many subjects. Sitting, standing, lounging, lying down. We felt the ardent hope that someday all of this would be completely gone.

The funeral director asked us if we thought we’d led a good life.

“You see,” we said, “these are the kinds of questions we never had to consider before you showed up.” But since he asked, we reflected for a moment and said there was no such thing as a good life. There was just a passage of time. And if we were lucky, there would be an end, whether we were aware of it or not.

That night, we couldn’t sleep, so we got up and walked back to the funeral director’s home. We could see no lights on in any of the windows. Quickly, we grabbed one of the posed bodies and brought it all the way to the coast, where we threw it into the water. It was so dense with formaldehyde that it instantly began to sink.

Some unsettling thoughts rose unbidden in our mind. They were hopes. We hoped that the water might carry the body at least a little distance from the coast. And we hoped that it wouldn’t end up someplace so deep that light couldn’t get to it.

We imagined the body resting on a little patch of ocean floor. We imagined it coming to life. Did we believe this would actually happen? We couldn’t tell. We no longer knew what we believed. But if the body did come to life, surely it wouldn’t be who it was before. It would be someone new. And that person would spend the rest of their days walking around, admiring the coral and algae and seaweed, befriending the fish, discovering new coves and grottos. Until one day, an unimaginably long time from now, that person would return to land and find a place—much like the sea—completely empty of people.

Cameron Vanderwerf is a Boston-based writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review, Minnesota Review, Worcester Review, Moon City Review, Write Launch, Every Day Fiction, Corvus Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University.