Island Funeral by Keith Minnion

Author:Keith Minnion [Minnion, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Thriller
ISBN: 9781587672682
Google: 91UBtwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1587672685
Goodreads: 11960934
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Pubns
Published: 2011-04-22T07:00:00+00:00

3

The ringing of a doorbell woke me from a morning nap. I heard Mrs. Hutchinson move from the kitchen to the center hall with a musical "Coming!" Fuller Brush Salesman, I thought, still half-asleep. Bald-headed Hare Krishnas in orange robes.

I heard someone with a loud voice that echoed up the stairs. "It's just not fair!" Mrs. Hutchinson's quiet, steady murmur followed. Avon calling? Loud Voice said something else, then the front door closed, firmly, and Mrs. Hutchinson returned to the kitchen.

More or less fully awake now, I swung my good, then bad leg over the side of the bed and stood slowly, settling my weight on the good one. A moment of dizziness passed, then I took two steps to the side window that overlooked part of the lawn, and the sweep of the gravel drive. I saw a figure there, leaving the property, trudging through the thin crust of snow to the road. The paint box and canvases slung over his back gave him away. So Conner Weatherby, the artiste, Santa Claus, had come to pay me a visit.

"You're in no condition for callers, Mr. Moser," Mrs. Hutchinson said later, when she brought me up my lunch. "Plenty of time for that." She handed me a napkin. "And anyway, Conner's just an old fool."

"Let him up next time, okay? Now what is this, pot roast?"

I began taking my lunch downstairs in the kitchen toward the end of my first week out of the hospital. I was slowly becoming used to walking with my cast, and I found I didn't really need to use the cane all of the time. I kept Mrs. Hutchinson company, sitting with her while she watched her game shows on the little counter TV. I was starting to mend. I could feel it.

"Pretty soon you won't need me around the place," she said, taking up my empty plate and moving to the sink. On the TV, someone guessed way too high for the car behind the curtain.

I said, "I'm going to miss your wonderful cooking, that's for sure." Then, to the TV: "Twenty-three thousand...it's twenty-three thousand...."

Mrs. Hutchinson laughed. "There're no secrets about my cooking. It's just good plain food. Twenty-two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine," and she grinned at me over her shoulder. "Don't you just hate it when they do that?"

She left promptly at one in her rusty, lime-green VW Beetle. I saw her off from the kitchen door. "You go back inside now and take that nap, do you good!" She waved once, and then was gone in a cloud of blue exhaust.

I stood on the granite slab that served as the kitchen door stoop, and took in the bright, empty sky, the dark pines swaying in the breeze, the scraps of snow remaining in only the deepest shadows, the sound of the water in the cove at the bottom of the gentle slope of hill, and for a moment, for one miraculous moment, a small trill of happiness went through me. It would get better.

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