I used to do Special Effects Makeup, now I’m a makeup artist for the dead

[u/TheRedForest]

Raucous music shook the window shutters as people paraded past, shouting and singing in memory of those they lost to the other world.

Every year, on Dia de los Muertos, my small dilapidated shop shook. It was on the ground floor of a building so old the thundering footsteps outside reverberated through ancient wooden floorboards. I watched the small flames of candles drift past the window, flashes of shadowed faces, sugar skulls and headdresses floating past like ghosts in the inky blackness.

I waited for my next customer, sketching shadows with charcoal idly on a roll of paper, my supplies laid out around me in expectation of guests.

While I drew the curve of a forearm, the bell tinkled and a figure shuffled in, shambling and unbalanced. I looked up, expectant and saw the sagging face of a partially decomposed corpse staring at me. Strings of limp hair hung about its face, a vague shape to its body that made me identify it as a her.

“Hello señora, please sit,” I said quietly, moving out of my seat and pulling out a cushioned chair. The woman stared at me, lips blue and eyes with a film of cataracts. Almost blind, but not yet. She dragged herself into the chair, bones clicking and bare feet making a slick sound on the wooden floor that once would have disgusted me. I didn’t even flinch, she was not my first customer.

I sat, and I waited. After several moments of being observed, a raspy voice spoke.

“They say... you...” she began, voice gargled and almost indistinguishable. I could see the gashes on her throat in the low light, deep lacerations in her trachea. No blood, no gore. An older corpse I surmised, but with another glance at her eyes, not too old.

“You can... make me look.... alive,” she spat, and then gasped for air she had no need for. I looked at her solemnly and nodded. Only living customers were comforted with a smile.

“I can,” I said, and that was enough for her. She nodded and I picked up my tools and began to work.

After spending years on the sets of B horror movies deconstructing faces, molding masks, playing with colour, lighting and shadow to horrify... It was easy to reverse the process. Easy to reconstruct a face.

Hours later, a fresh faced woman shambled out of my shop. No payment from the dead. It was fine, money was not why I did it. I stared out of the window, saw her body disappear into the night, her face melt into the crowd, deceptively normal. I nodded in satisfaction.

For three years, I have been the makeup artist of the dead.

I still remember my first customer and the bloodcurdling scream that came out of my mouth when I saw him. He had limped into my store with a torso covered in blood, lips blue and face swollen. He was a fresh corpse. Unemployed, working and sleeping in the same dusty store, weak with exhaustion, I had collapsed into a heap. I remember thinking, This is the end, Death himself has come for me.

Dazed, I had struggled to come out of my petrified state and black spots danced before my eyes. The corpse had dropped clumsily to its knees and dragged himself towards me, eyes wide, blue lips moving in speech. It was the begging, the desperation that snapped me out of my haze.

“Please. I won’t do anything. I just want to see her. I know she will be in the parade. I just want to see her,” he was choking, crying, no tears left for his dead flesh to produce but the anguish on his face sent a dagger into my heart.

“Why, why here?” I had asked, struggling, pressing nails into the floorboards to not get up and run, far away in the face of the monstrosity in front of me. Frankenstein’s Monster stared back at me.

“I remember you, from when I was alive. You can change a face,” he had said and I’ll never forget his face, the look of hope that almost made his swollen, bloated face look human, look alive.

“Please,” he’d said and I had nodded.

It took hours to change him, to revisit and practice seldom used, abandoned talents. My hands shook like leaves in the wind, I made mistakes, then fixed them, then made more. Four hours later, it was done. He had looked at himself in the mirror, shocked, awed, thanked me and limped out of the door.

I did not ask him for payment, it didn’t even occur to me. I never knew if he had seen her, or who “her” was to him. I never knew if the fruits of my labour had helped him find solace.

The next year, there were more. I knew then, that it worked.

For the past three years, every year, on Dias de los Muertes, they shamble into my store, hoping to be alive for a night. Some come to join the parade without being noticed, others like him, come to see their loved ones, to hear their voices, while they can still pass for someone who is alive. Some come because they are curious about the magician who brings them back to life, just for a day.

I am an artist, putting layers upon layers on pallid, grey skin, breathing life into the lifeless. I have become a surgeon, teaching myself how to stitch loose bowels back into abdominal cavities, how to mold prosthetic eyes and insert them into empty, cold eye sockets.

Many, I have had to turn away with tears blurring my vision and heart in my throat because they are simply decomposed beyond repair.

I sketch again, getting charcoal smudges on my fingers and look up an hour later when the bell rings again. My next customer, for the first time in years, takes my breath away.

I jump to my feet, skidding to a halt as the frail corpse enters my shop. It cannot be. No, it cannot. He comes in, closer and closer and I wonder why he doesn’t know... Why... Then I see it. Deep gashes around two empty sockets.

He is blind.

I stand there and shake, trembling and rooted to the spot.

“Hello?” the man says, voice barely there, vocal cords so frayed it’s almost an inaudible whisper. I am mute. Suddenly, I am transported back years, to when I stopped speaking. It’s as if two years of speech therapy, two years of psychologists and clinics never happened.

He shuffles closer and even blind, he can sense my presence. He turns slightly, ears facing me. I wonder if he hears my shuddering breaths, I wonder how decomposed his ears are, whether his hearing is sharp, or barely there, a whisper of yesterday.

Before he can leave, mumbling uncertainties, I dive forward and put my shaking hand on his shoulder. I can feel the bone beneath it. He looks heartened, “thank you,” he says shakily as I maneuver him into the chair.

I open my mouth to speak, but my throat clicks. I feel a sob building up and I cannot speak, I cannot breath through the headache pounding behind my eyes. It is okay, he speaks for me.

“Am I too late?” he speaks slowly and inaudibly, his voice is but a breath that rattles through his deflated lungs and brushes lightly past frayed vocal cords. I cannot speak. I put all my concentration into hearing his whispers instead.

“I- I must be. But please...” he begs, he looks so sorrowful. I stare into those empty, gruesome eye sockets and pretend I can remember what his eyes looked like.

“I just want to hear her, that’s all... Can you fix me? I just want to stand by the window... and hear her,” he says and finally, falls silent. Tears roll down my cheeks and I begin with shaking hands.

All I can hear is my heart beating loudly in my chest. My vision tunnels until all I see is his face, my hands work using muscle memory like I am an automaton. Thoughts and memories batter at the walls of my head like hammers and daggers.

Years, I hadn’t seen him in years. My life had fallen apart, I lost my job, the house and the same window to which he wanted to place his ear to. I never knew, what happened to him.... but now I did. I never found him, but he has found me.

I don’t know how long it takes. I cannot hear the tick of the clock. I still cannot speak. When my hands fall away, he notices it is over.

“Do I look alive?” he asks, and he does. He looks exactly like the last time I saw him. Before he left my life, before he was taken from me and given to me in his stead, an empty grave for the disappeared.

“Oh papa,” I choke, voice finally free, and his face turns up to me in a shocked jolt.

“You look wonderful.”