Blue Ink by Molly Riggs

Author:Molly Riggs [Riggs, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637303498
Publisher: New Degree Press
Published: 2021-08-30T12:46:06+00:00

12

Another Funeral

All the words he had found in the dark of night on the balcony fell away on the car ride to the cemetery as he resorted back to his usual quiet self. I didn’t push him because I could tell he was just trying to focus on his breath, focus on getting through this day.

I’m sick of funerals, I remember him saying. He looked sick. Physically sick. His body curved in on itself like the misshapen lumps of a deteriorating statue: rigid, pale, with sunken dark lines running like cracks beneath his eyes.

As I parked and turned off the car, I thought I might have to pull another motivating story out of my ass to get him to move. But he had opened and closed the passenger-side door before I could even open my mouth, buttoned up his suit jacket, and waited patiently for me.

I got out wordlessly and followed him through the front gates of the cemetery. It was a nice space: calm and quiet, with green grass and an appropriate scatter of trees already budding new flowers of the coming spring. You could feel the shifting season in the air, the sunlight warm even though there was still a bit of a winter nip around the edges. The funeral site, set up with white chairs and a pre-dug hole, was on top of a hill. There was no one there but the priest, the casket, and us.

“Will anyone else be coming?” the priest whispered to him, ten minutes after the service was set to start.

“No, you can begin,” he said stoically.

My throat went tight, glancing back at the three rows of empty seats. As the priest started in, his tired reassurances that God needed another angel and that his dad was in a better place were like wisps of thin candle smoke in the meager breeze. There were not enough living, breathing bodies there to absorb the clichéd homily and render it comforting. Instead, it felt cheap and flimsy, disintegrating upon impact against the plastic chairs. I glanced at him in my peripheral throughout the service, his posture unnaturally straight, making him look especially heavy but also solid in contrast to the shallowness of everything else. I rubbed my sweaty palms on my thighs and tried to mimic that air of stability, but the rows at my back sucked the life out of me. Their hollowness dug in and scooped out my spine, leaving me slumped wretchedly in my own seat.

“I told them not to set up so many chairs,” he said after the service had ended, once the priest had finished with his verses, and he had thrown a handful of dirt over his lowered father. We stood a little distance away from the grave and watched the funeral home pack up those somber folding chairs while the groundsmen filled in the hole. I still felt the ghost of their hollow inhabitance in my chest. “Guess I should have been more specific.”

“The responsibility of planning this thing fell on you?” I hadn’t known that.

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