Instead of feeling excited whenever anyone announced that he or she had adopted a new puppy or other infant pet, Ruby immediately felt a pang of sympathy, for her first thought was never of the happy life that the owner would share with the animal, but rather that the puppy or kitten or domesticated rodent would die one day. She thought of how sad the owner would be if his puppy were to be run over by a plump middle-aged woman on a rainy day driving home in a car with failing windshield wipers, or how devastating if, when the owner goes to the vet for an annual checkup, he finds out that in its old age, the pet has jaw cancer or is blind in one eye. Likewise, whenever a new romantic relationship began, she allowed herself only a fleeting moment of happiness before accepting with grim stoicism that the relationship would inevitably fail. In turn, she stopped beginning, and, for that matter, ending, relationships altogether, and found comfort in meaningless nights with men whose last names she never knew. For such nights freed her from the pesky burden of having to care about something that would eventually become a mangled, distorted, disappointing version of itself. Her acute awareness of temporality pressed on her, and resulted in unbound cynicism and a paralyzed gaze that constantly focused on endings.

That day, seated in the second row at her grandmother’s funeral, surrounded by relatives who were more like strangers, she listened to sadness and mucus rhythmically bursting out of the noses of those present, and much to her surprise, discovered a piece of dried oatmeal on her scarf. She reviewed her most recent clothing choices. It was early November, which meant she had not worn the scarf since approximately late February of that year. The scarf had hung neglected in the back of her closet during the spring and summer, and the oatmeal had clung to it for those months. She admired its loyalty, and realized she had never stuck with anything that long. She wondered if the scarf had felt the oatmeal’s presence, like an itch, and if the oatmeal had felt lonely and confused as to how it had ended up in a place so very different from its intended location of Ruby’s digestive tract. She picked at the oatmeal, and after a bit of difficulty — the result of a lifetime of incessant nail biting — scraped the crusty remnant off the fabric and absentmindedly brushed it to the floor. She was certain that when she had poured that unremarkable flake of oatmeal, one of hundreds of flakes in a blueberry flavored packet that came in a Quaker’s Instant Oatmeal Variety Box, into a microwave-safe bowl with three-quarters of a cup of milk seven months ago, the piece of oatmeal in question never would have imagined it would one day end up on a funeral home’s carpet amid salty tears and the mysterious white dust that billows off of Kleenexes. Ruby thought of all the places she had ended up without intention, and realized she had more in common with the piece of old oatmeal than she felt comfortable admitting.

She refocused her attention on the frail minister who was delivering a vague sermon about pain and loss, and to pass the time, she imagined him dressed in a bunny costume, then wondered if that was disrespectful. This was the third funeral she had attended since her own birth, and at each, she became progressively more troubled by how little emotion she allowed herself to feel. While her younger sister lost close to six ounces of tears that day alone, Ruby’s eyes stayed obnoxiously dry, even though she had many more memories of her grandmother to cry over. She attributed this to the fact that she had known this day would come since she became aware of human mortality at a very early age. For as long as she could remember, when she found herself in big crowds she wondered who would die first out of everyone present. It wasn’t a dark or dangerous curiosity, but a matter-of-fact acknowledgement that life is temporary.

Ruby lapsed into phases of appreciation for obscure animals, notable historical figures and celebrities or academic subjects, and she obtained the Funeral Plans notebook during her Pug Phase when she was ten. She adored pugs, and three weeks into her obsession, had made five visits to the pet store to gaze at them, though she never held or touched them out of an unspoken fear that they would uncontrollably urinate on her clothing. She had drawn several pictures of them on pages secretly stolen from her brother’s sketchbook, and choosing to ignore her father’s fur allergy, wrote an official petition for the adoption of one into the family.