The Fiction Continues (Still With No Reason Provided)
When the lights came on, joined in part by the dull, whirring sound of electricity initiating, it revealed a lovely display of death, dressed-up. In the centre of it all, raised slightly by a small platform, stood the reason for the occasion: a varnished, cedar coffin carved with delicate, floral designs along the sides. The pall was raised, revealing the dove-white padding on the inside, and also the lifeless, pallid figure resting therein.
Powdered, wintry facial features, all too symmetrical and perfect, were distinguishing a head topped in trimmed, combed, fragrant brownish-blonde hair. An especially oval quality was notable of the boy’s head, as well, and his neck was wide and stubby; which lead into a stiffened, ironed collar attached to a button-down, cyan-striped men’s dress-shirt. His two arms were crossed over the breast of the shirt, grasping each other’s hands in a frozen vision of a solemn prayer position.
Adjoining this morbid stand to the deceased was a veritable garden of flowers, hung and sat and draped about the corpse like some homage to the legacy of Babylon. White lilies and yellow daffodils; crimson, golden, and ivory roses; cyathiums of the darkest azure, or starkest violet; even daisies so daintily placed encircled the coffin, around and around. There would be much conversation about the flamboyant, ironic picture of such a person put in the midst of such beauty, that much was ensured.
When the body had first been wheeled into the morgue, the mortician on duty barely batted an eye at what was, lately, a common enough sight: young man, gunshot and stab wounds, signs of needle-use along the arms. He needn’t ask to know the story -- either a drug deal went wrong, or a coincidental gang fight happened, or whatever. It really didn’t matter much, in the eyes of the body’s last caretaker, since his job was to make it all look prim and digestible. Viewers of the corpse would later comment on the success of such an endeavour, too; they always did.
The arrangements for the ceremonies of the final rites of life had fallen into the hands of not the parents’ of this young man, but, instead, into the lap of his mother’s sister (the woman he had, as a young boy, delightfully addressed as Auntie Miss Lisa). It would’ve been rather difficult for either one of the boy’s bearers to perform the funerary procedure, anyhow, seeing as to how one had been the recipient of similar treatment already, and the other was committed to a behavioural institution, in the week following the son’s death. It was an arduous task for Auntie Miss Lisa to be taking care of, too, considering her two jobs and living son. However, she was to be commended later on for a job exquisitely well-done – as much of a consolation that, of course, is – more than likely.
Linen-clothed tables on wheels stood silent along one of the walls of the blank-walled, off-white room. Bread, ham, chicken, crackers, cookies, turkey, various cheeses, and sausages – all fresh and pristine – glimmered in the florescent light of the overhead fixtures, eagerly awaiting their future consumption by the black-dressed vultures soon to descend upon the site of the dead. Napkins, plates, and plasticware were all intelligently laid out, mostly to ensure the prevention of stains befalling the room’s light-blue carpeting. It was not a setup of the cheap variety, and all the expenses came out of the pocketbook of dear Auntie Miss Lisa. After all, little had been provided for in the event of the deceased’s passing, what with the laughably unpredictable probability of such an occurrence.
Unsurprising to almost all involved, the last response to the announcement of the gathering had been shock or sorrow; few mourned the loss, more celebrating the freedom. It had been a burdened existence within the family of the dead, veiling their shame and disgust in lieu of expressing the blunt and ugly truth of the matter: nobody saw worth in the boy, while alive. On the morrow of the discovery of the crime, there had been – reluctantly, it is to be imagined – phone calls to the traumatized, frantic mother, sharing in the sadness and delving out condolence and empathy; eyes turned to wet actors and ears shut down like expulsed appliances. A scene of the most typical of the sort for such a thing, it is to be guaranteed.
Indeed, one may even go so far as to say that nobody gave a damned care, in the world, except for his poor mother, of course -- she went insane.
What a spectacular scene that had been: more exciting and eventful than the boy’s death, was the surrealistic image of his mother, half-naked and screaming, being escorted forcibly by two police officers out the front door of her home. Clad in a shirt that hung baggy in excess on her frail, tiny body -- it fell midway down her thighs like a short dress – and underwear, she squirmed in the hands of the overpowering man and woman, in the process slinging blood onto their blue, ruffled uniforms. Auntie Miss Lisa had found her, an hour earlier, cowed in an unlit corner of her bedroom by the supposed, snarling threats of a spectral image of her son. The sister found her with a butter-knife gripped tightly in her palm, complete with blood dripping down her arms: it had been by the command of the ghost, apparently, to cut herself. One could guess that psychologists would later diagnose her with post-traumatic stress syndrome, but even with the aid of a name, it still had most definitely, right then and there, at that moment, broken her psyche apart into disconnected, irreparable shards.
Some say it had only been a matter of time, that ever since her husband had died, she had never been quite together. Suppose it didn’t help matters once the boy started with the whole drug affair. Never does a mother well to see her prodigy wilt like a flower in a tainted sun, you know.
As what one could call the host, for the day, of the funeral home strode down the hallway, he watched a young mother pulling along a boy of an age no later than ten years. In the hand not being held by his mother, the son was gripping a bouquet of dandelions, their seeds springing lose from the stem and scattering across the hall. As he received scolding and berating for running off and picking weeds, the child gazed upward at his mother’s face, with what the wandering worker curiously noted as a strangely mature countenance for someone his age. The caretaker thought to himself, as he patrolled the halls of the final house for the dead, that the boy seemed very sad, very concerned, but, yet, extremely angry at something. It was in the eyes -- the child’s vivid, rust-coloured eyes – that an infinite well of innocent and pure compassion resided, but the downturn of his lips was just so slightly more than was normal. In his time of employment at the funerary parlour, many a sorrowful face passed before his field of vision, but this one lingered in his mind: haunted his subconscious. In a dream that next night, the short figure of that boy stood before him, cloaked in a surrounding of blackness, and stared into his mind’s eye; while he pierced through his soul visually, tears rushed down his cheeks, but, more disturbingly than that, was the outpouring of blood that rained from his lips.
When he woke up, the cacophony of a thousand children laughing intermingled with a thousand thousand children screaming echoed from ear to ear. That morning, before work, he took his normal coffee with a shot of brandy.
Powdered, wintry facial features, all too symmetrical and perfect, were distinguishing a head topped in trimmed, combed, fragrant brownish-blonde hair. An especially oval quality was notable of the boy’s head, as well, and his neck was wide and stubby; which lead into a stiffened, ironed collar attached to a button-down, cyan-striped men’s dress-shirt. His two arms were crossed over the breast of the shirt, grasping each other’s hands in a frozen vision of a solemn prayer position.
Adjoining this morbid stand to the deceased was a veritable garden of flowers, hung and sat and draped about the corpse like some homage to the legacy of Babylon. White lilies and yellow daffodils; crimson, golden, and ivory roses; cyathiums of the darkest azure, or starkest violet; even daisies so daintily placed encircled the coffin, around and around. There would be much conversation about the flamboyant, ironic picture of such a person put in the midst of such beauty, that much was ensured.
When the body had first been wheeled into the morgue, the mortician on duty barely batted an eye at what was, lately, a common enough sight: young man, gunshot and stab wounds, signs of needle-use along the arms. He needn’t ask to know the story -- either a drug deal went wrong, or a coincidental gang fight happened, or whatever. It really didn’t matter much, in the eyes of the body’s last caretaker, since his job was to make it all look prim and digestible. Viewers of the corpse would later comment on the success of such an endeavour, too; they always did.
The arrangements for the ceremonies of the final rites of life had fallen into the hands of not the parents’ of this young man, but, instead, into the lap of his mother’s sister (the woman he had, as a young boy, delightfully addressed as Auntie Miss Lisa). It would’ve been rather difficult for either one of the boy’s bearers to perform the funerary procedure, anyhow, seeing as to how one had been the recipient of similar treatment already, and the other was committed to a behavioural institution, in the week following the son’s death. It was an arduous task for Auntie Miss Lisa to be taking care of, too, considering her two jobs and living son. However, she was to be commended later on for a job exquisitely well-done – as much of a consolation that, of course, is – more than likely.
Linen-clothed tables on wheels stood silent along one of the walls of the blank-walled, off-white room. Bread, ham, chicken, crackers, cookies, turkey, various cheeses, and sausages – all fresh and pristine – glimmered in the florescent light of the overhead fixtures, eagerly awaiting their future consumption by the black-dressed vultures soon to descend upon the site of the dead. Napkins, plates, and plasticware were all intelligently laid out, mostly to ensure the prevention of stains befalling the room’s light-blue carpeting. It was not a setup of the cheap variety, and all the expenses came out of the pocketbook of dear Auntie Miss Lisa. After all, little had been provided for in the event of the deceased’s passing, what with the laughably unpredictable probability of such an occurrence.
Unsurprising to almost all involved, the last response to the announcement of the gathering had been shock or sorrow; few mourned the loss, more celebrating the freedom. It had been a burdened existence within the family of the dead, veiling their shame and disgust in lieu of expressing the blunt and ugly truth of the matter: nobody saw worth in the boy, while alive. On the morrow of the discovery of the crime, there had been – reluctantly, it is to be imagined – phone calls to the traumatized, frantic mother, sharing in the sadness and delving out condolence and empathy; eyes turned to wet actors and ears shut down like expulsed appliances. A scene of the most typical of the sort for such a thing, it is to be guaranteed.
Indeed, one may even go so far as to say that nobody gave a damned care, in the world, except for his poor mother, of course -- she went insane.
What a spectacular scene that had been: more exciting and eventful than the boy’s death, was the surrealistic image of his mother, half-naked and screaming, being escorted forcibly by two police officers out the front door of her home. Clad in a shirt that hung baggy in excess on her frail, tiny body -- it fell midway down her thighs like a short dress – and underwear, she squirmed in the hands of the overpowering man and woman, in the process slinging blood onto their blue, ruffled uniforms. Auntie Miss Lisa had found her, an hour earlier, cowed in an unlit corner of her bedroom by the supposed, snarling threats of a spectral image of her son. The sister found her with a butter-knife gripped tightly in her palm, complete with blood dripping down her arms: it had been by the command of the ghost, apparently, to cut herself. One could guess that psychologists would later diagnose her with post-traumatic stress syndrome, but even with the aid of a name, it still had most definitely, right then and there, at that moment, broken her psyche apart into disconnected, irreparable shards.
Some say it had only been a matter of time, that ever since her husband had died, she had never been quite together. Suppose it didn’t help matters once the boy started with the whole drug affair. Never does a mother well to see her prodigy wilt like a flower in a tainted sun, you know.
As what one could call the host, for the day, of the funeral home strode down the hallway, he watched a young mother pulling along a boy of an age no later than ten years. In the hand not being held by his mother, the son was gripping a bouquet of dandelions, their seeds springing lose from the stem and scattering across the hall. As he received scolding and berating for running off and picking weeds, the child gazed upward at his mother’s face, with what the wandering worker curiously noted as a strangely mature countenance for someone his age. The caretaker thought to himself, as he patrolled the halls of the final house for the dead, that the boy seemed very sad, very concerned, but, yet, extremely angry at something. It was in the eyes -- the child’s vivid, rust-coloured eyes – that an infinite well of innocent and pure compassion resided, but the downturn of his lips was just so slightly more than was normal. In his time of employment at the funerary parlour, many a sorrowful face passed before his field of vision, but this one lingered in his mind: haunted his subconscious. In a dream that next night, the short figure of that boy stood before him, cloaked in a surrounding of blackness, and stared into his mind’s eye; while he pierced through his soul visually, tears rushed down his cheeks, but, more disturbingly than that, was the outpouring of blood that rained from his lips.
When he woke up, the cacophony of a thousand children laughing intermingled with a thousand thousand children screaming echoed from ear to ear. That morning, before work, he took his normal coffee with a shot of brandy.
posted by c.Jay Wrong at
3:55 PM
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