THE TENNE-SCENE
SEPTEMBER 7, 2065
MaeJo Jonas, fourth-generation mortician at Jonas Funeral Home in Laurel Bloomery, has died. She was 38. Her death from ovarian cancer was confirmed by her mother, Martha Jonas.
It is not often that our little town makes national news, but Jonas was not your average mortician. Fans (yes, fans!) know her better by her handle on the online discussion forum Rabbit—“the_decomposer.”
Jonas’s notoriety began, like so much internet fame, with a rant.
“OK I need to blow off some steam,” she wrote in her first post. “No little girl grows up thinking, ‘Gee, I can’t wait to slice open a bloated dead guy’s throat and yank out whatever choked him to death,’ but here I am, wrist deep in a stranger’s neck, trying to grip what turns out to be…a rubber ducky.”
Rabbitors at first were skeptical. The stories were impossibly lurid, bizarre, absurd, and no one has ever accused the online world of being populated by wide-eyed innocents. “It’s all fake. She just wants attention,” commented a skeptic in response to one of Jonas’s most “upvoted” stories—where a hiker was found dead on the nearby Appalachian Trail, missing both arms. According to Jonas’s post, the body was terribly distended and discolored but oddly showed no signs of struggle, arms lopped clean off, almost surgically so, and lying neatly at the body’s feet, fingers intertwined as though in prayer.
“I’m just trying to make sense of my life,” she responded. “You chose to pay me with your attention, and you are free to take your business elsewhere.”
The_decomposer became known as a poet of death, describing the vivid colors, smells and sounds of decomposition. And what began as Jonas expressing frustration with a career she felt coerced into soon became a philosophical advice column. Fans would comment with their own questions about death—some emotional, some religious, and many asking specific questions about what happens to the body after death.
“We know about growth spurts and puberty, what happens when we exercise, when we sit too much, when we smoke, and when we age,” wrote Jonas for an AMA, or “Ask Me Anything.” “But how many people know what happens to the body after death? We’d be way less anxious about dying if we knew what happens to us afterwards, and I’m not talking about heaven.”
After she disappeared from Rabbit for several weeks last year, fans began to worry, many eventually calling the funeral home to check up on Jonas. They always got a recording, recorded on an actual answering machine. “I didn’t even know ‘answering machines’ were a thing,” wrote fan FuninFuneral, “but I guess that’s Appalachia for you.” Eventually Jonas resurfaced, along with a complete album of songs called “The Decompositions.” Each song was about one of the corpses that turned up on her slab. Even with no financial backing and no marketing, the album went viral, and Jonas licensed the instrumental “Headless Hiker” to a commercial for the Hyundai Solar.
By turns haunting, silly, and raucous, the songs on “The Decompositions” reflected MaeJo Jonas’s unique irreverent style. “They’re not bluegrass, but they are banjo songs. They’re not rock, but they have a boppy drumbeat. They’re not R&B or experimental or pop or alternative,” said one review. “She’s her own genre. The world would be only too lucky to get a follow-up from Jonas, whose originality is redolent of David Bowie or Sargent.” Many critics called “The Decompositions” “musical obituaries,” but this description made MaeJo bristle, arguing that obituaries summarize a person’s life, whereas she was singing about actual corpses.
MaeJo Jonas was born in Laurel Bloomery to Rock and Martha Jonas in 2027, the first birth in the town in over five years. Outsiders have wondered how a town with no births could have so many deaths, but as the_decomposer explained, those are in consistent supply from the nearby Appalachian Trail. Jonas spent her childhood doing homework with formaldehyde in her nostrils, an outsider mocked by her classmates in nearby Mountain City. She finished high school early and defied her father by going to college for music and paying her own way. But when Rock died of lung cancer in 2046, she dropped out and took over the family business.
She never married or had children, and it wasn’t until her death that a will was discovered—written and recorded as a song about her own corpse. Deeply unconventional, the will is so far considered legitimate, as it was signed, notarized and witnessed. However, the witness was a person no one in her family had ever met, but whom Jonas must have met in her online life—an artist named Lightness Maganga of Chicago, who died last year. In the song/will, MaeJo willingly bequeathed her body as a donation for something called a “human fall”—where her body would be dropped to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico as part of a joint science experiment and art installation.
“MaeJo has never been on an airplane or seen the ocean,” said Martha. “My baby is not a science experiment or a silly art project, and we do not intend to follow through on this grotesque and impulsive promise to a stranger. MaeJo will have a Christian burial in the earth like her father and her ancestors, right here in Tennessee.”
Given the death of the artist Maganga and the fact of the will hanging in legal limbo, MaeJo Jonas, Rabbit’s the_decomposer, will be kept in her own mortuary’s freezer for the foreseeable future, unable to decompose and trapped in time.