Untitled Short Story

The procession moved and the arcs of
The trees bade fair passage down the green.
When he could no longer see nor hear them, he turned and
Considered staying his ground.
He did not want to go back in there today.
The girl was waiting in the foyer when he entered.
The tiles robbed them of their tongues, and they spoke
In whispers free of secrets. She was waiting.
For the florists, she said.
Her eyes lined so heavily were
Too pretty for this place, he thought in passing, and she
Too young. A white flower blossomed against
The black of her breast and he had one himself,
The stem entwined with wire,
Twisting in his fingers. He looked at the time:
Time enough.
Not until eleven.

The light turned red just before
They reached it.

He pushed open the door and hit the lights and
The lights fell on the dark wood, so resplendent and
Serene in form, so gilded and majestic. Looking at their mass,
Their weight, exhausted him, and he turned back
To speak with the girl and pass time with her eyes waiting
For the flowers to arrive. But she was in the office, and
He could hear her voice on the phone and he took
A breath of air and felt a rush of despair and
Swallowed it. His suit jacket itched around the collar and
He took it off and left it hanging on the door, the flower
Blooming from the lapel half hidden by folds of cloth.

None wept now.
The procession moved, seeming to them
Less immense than it should.
The father, the son,
The engine’s hum.
The bird’s song.
That they would all be quiet!
For just a second. For
Just one second that
They would all be silent.

A Weston, he reminded himself, and
A Nicholas Poplar.
The latter like the one sent out that morning
For internment.
He cared for neither. Give me
A stone slab and a furnace. No
Waste of wood or earth.
The thought of consummation, of
Immolation, conflagration, transubstantiation
Comforted him on mornings like these, when
He felt close to toppling under the weight of this
Wood and that bone.
Hell, he thought.
I’ll even look forward to it.
A Weston and a Nicholas, he thought. And
The Nicholas goes out open at eleven, yes, and
Then the day is halfway through.

Yesterday none had spoke
For fear of what might overtake the words.
Now there was nothing left to mitigate with silence.
What there was now was capacious and
Impenetrable, he thought. Like
Teeth, teeth buried, sunken.
A half-formed twin parsed out through tissue and
Amidst organs
Only now making its presence known
Through chasmal maw and desperate scream.
That is what it feels like.
Too great to be my own.

Of course, he didn’t clean out
The bin, or the grate.
Someone else did that. He’d seen
The ashes spilt,
Clouding the air, a beloved haze.
He wondered if they held their breath
Or if they coughed it up in the morning.
He’d seen the bones, the chips,
Like chalk, taken out and ground.
He remembered the day his father
Had brought a finger home.
Dry as a bone, Dad said, and they laughed. He had been five.
It was wedged in the grate, Dad said,
For who knows how long.
See the joints, he said.
They’d measured it, found it five inches long. And then
Laughing Dad had held it up to his own finger
In comparison and
In that moment he himself
Had ceased to laugh, and knew what death was.
He did not care to see the bone any longer and
He began to cry when Dad, puzzled,
Would not put it away.
He would not follow in his father’s footsteps,
He’d promised himself,
But then the years came and the schooling failed him and
The loans piled up and Dad,
Whose hands represented now so much more
Than they should,
Came to him and said Well, You Know, and
Paused there in ellipses and
Now eleven o’clock was nearly here and
The Nicholas needed to be ready for display.

The cherry trees had bloomed.
When the parcel of earth had been sought and paid for
Not one week ago,
He remembered, they had been bare.
Some one was trying to make him smile,
Some signifier bearing witness to some glory.
But it was to be in vain.
He would not find joy here.
She did not know what she asked of him,
She simply did not know.
He looked at his father,
Who did know, he knew,
And hoped he was not trying to bear
His son’s grief.
That was his own and he held it close and
Would carry it always.
And after all, he had hugged his father that morning
Or his father had hugged him.
Their first in a decade, and it was enough sharing,
Enough reciprocation, at least for one day.
But were that not so, he thought suddenly! And
He knew he must not speak.

He heard a noise in the adjoining room.
A clatter of metal on the floor,
Of glass and china,
Pitched high and sharp enough to make him cringe.
The caterer was setting up her things.
Stacks of too-small plates,
An urn for coffee or tea.
Silver trays over tiny gas burners.
She saw him looking in and smiled gently,
With what was that? Compassion?
For whom?
While she doled out ladlefuls of punch into cups
In memory of some patriarch whose effigy
Now ensconced in satin and soft wood,
Stuffed full of cotton and chemicals,
Was to be rolled out at eleven?
There was a whoosh
Now, a quiet burst of air,
He could smell the plume of gas
As the blue flames licked the bottom of the pans and
He left with its scent in his nostrils,
That sound still on his ears.
That’s the way it sounded.
That’s they way it should be.

Soft verdant turf underfoot –
Would he sink? No,
It would hold.
He took hold of one handle, his son opposite him.
His brother behind his son.
His friend from his days in school,
Days spent saving dimes for cars for dates with girls,
Back when there were girls,
He was there too, behind him.
How long had he been there? And who had invited him?
He had looked around earlier, at home, and
Perhaps it was because his vision was blurred
That he could not make out
A single face
Or separate the clusters of black
Into recognizable forms.
They all shared the same white mask,
The same black form, and he had to assume
They all deserved to be there.
He took a concerted step and felt
The weight in his hand.
He felt the gold on his finger pushing against
The bronze of the handle.
Cold alchemistry, at work there,
Synergy broken by the wood before
The ore could spread its veins.
The teeth scattered throughout his chest
Ground together in dissatisfaction.
But he knew he could not carry it himself and
Looking up at his amorphous company
He knew that he was glad for it.

The florists had finally made their delivery
And a tangle of shoots and stems and glass
Now threatened the fluorescence of his space.
Some were to be used now, others later in the day –
For indeed they were on a schedule - and
When they were all done with they were to be taken out
To dry up, molder and decay.
He wished that they would grow instead.
He wished to see tendrils of green creep over the tiles,
Around his ankles.
He had a vision of the open boxes and those
Bourne by them surrounded
By advancing florae, the bricks of the wall
Hemorrhaging with earth, the steel and plaster
Overtaken with ivy. And
the bones, they would be embraced.
No approximation incorruptible.
They would rise and fall in symphony with the dirt
And the dust and the dew.
He plunged his hands into this thornless bramble
And felt the stucco on the other side and the vision faded.
He took a vase in the crook of each arm
And carried them past that undulating curtain
That masked the belly of the building.
This room was a façade, and he hated it.
This ugly, plain room with its two columns of
Empty seats aligned like pews for worship,
And four walls that by design mocked what they absorbed.
Designed to contain, to recede, to be forgotten, to alleviate,
Windowless, made to hide the sky, and perhaps
The sea, where
The Viking Pyres, their confluence of elements,
Were long foregone.
He placed the flowers on their marble pedestals.
They flanked an empty space, sentries
To nothing.
They cast out their ceremonial veil, redolent with
Violet and Azure,
For the time being there only to soothe,
Not to mask.
He stood between them and looked at the chairs
And saw their occupants, who day in and out
Never changed.
If only you knew, he thought, with no answer in mind
To his rhetoric.
A door opened
And closed.
It was time to fill that empty space and put
The flowers to work.
He left the curtain shifting softly
In his passing and passed
The Weston and noted now
That it must be ready by three.

He winced and shut his eyes againt the sound.
Someone had touched the winch,
Just nudged it enough to make it squeal.
Vociferous, piercing, silly,
Soon lost in birdsong.
But the same thoughts darted from head
To head and
Some froze
Where they stood and
Others coughed and
All were thinking that when
The last words had been said and
All the prayers offered,
That winch would do its work and
It and its rusty jeering whine
Would get the last word in.
When the time came and
It was lowered, though,
It made no sound.
Perhaps someone had oiled it,
Had found time during the Benediction
To run for an oil can.
He thought he would have noticed until
He realized he could not even remember
The descent itself. When had it happened?
One moment floating, the next sunk,
I blinked my eye, that’s all, and
Someone ran for an oil can and now
She’s one more layer away.
Flesh, wood, soon dirt.
He could see the poplar chassis from where
He stood; but were he to take
Two steps back, it would vanish forever.
He stood thus transfixed, but
The thought occurred to him,
He toyed right then with the idea,
That he might now turn away and
Be done with it; but that same moment
Brought a fever to the space behind
His eyes, and
He stood his ground and
Made it last.

The Nicholas was rolled out, the wheels braked,
The cart masked by more flowers, the lid opened.
He let his eyes take their moment to adjust and still he never
Truly saw what was inside. He always saw the ridges
Of wax and cotton, the sheen of the makeup,
Should there be any of either,
But he never really looked.
He stepped to the back of the room, and took
One long gaze at the arrangement,
The organization,
The symmetry,
The obstruction just before the vanishing point.
Then he turned and opened
The double doors and felt his lapel and straightened
The flower’s wire.

The flowers fell, a matted clump but
He closed his eyes and before he heard their
Quiet and unremarkable contact he saw
A rain of petals, glorious, sad, beautiful, respectful,
A falling ascension. He turned away and
Turned away and soon he turning became
They and they turned and heard soon after the
Quiet sound of earth, rather than petals,
Raining on the wood. It was a good sound, rich
And heavy, and they listened to it as they nodded
Their heads and accepted
Condolences and grievances, the verses to
The rhythm, the beat; and the space between
The beats became interminable and
The sound was remapped and
Became something long and guttural
And deep. It released them as the earth closed up and
The space between them became
A pyre. They turned and
Turned and burned and
When the drumbeat ceased they heard
The birds again, and the black car,
Waiting for them; but they thought
They might rather walk.

The word came to him in whispers, passed down
The line, and by the time it reached
His ears he had already heard the murmurs and seen
Through swinging doors the passing of people
Only just arrived.
The girl in her dress was pale
When she told him, her rouge suddenly transparent and
Her lined eyes full of tears he could not
Account for.
She leaned in and whispered with a voice
Heavy with secret things. She told him his mistake in
So few words that he was waiting
For her to finish while she withdrew. Was waiting
As the murmur grew louder, as it dispersed,
As the doors swung, open and close, open
And close.
Waiting, as people, rushing, to and fro,
Turned fluid before his eyes.
Waiting.
He still waits, wondering
Why there were tears in her pretty eyes.
The wrong one, yes, but
What did she know
That he did not?