Short: Coffer Box

The soil behind the church smelled like worms. It had rained the night before the funeral, leaving behind rivulets that were still rolling down the willow leaves, flattening and dripping onto the casket.

Floyd had helped his mother decide which one the body would go in, reminding her of his father’s liking for cherry wood, which he had used to decorate most of the house. They ordered the casket extra-long to accommodate his height; Floyd shuddered looking at it — a box for a giant. He remembered climbing trees when he was young and still being barely level with his father’s eyes. Everyone at the wake told Floyd he had his eyes.

Beside him, his mother stifled her sobbing by pressing her nose into a silk handkerchief. There was a monogram in its left corner, an illegible blur of golden thread. Watching her, Floyd wondered what of his father’s he might take as a memento.

Floyd and his mother spent the next week in the old house packing away his father’s things. The stroke was unexpected; a half-sipped scotch still sat on the dining room table, dust beginning to speckle the rim. Floyd stared at it for a moment before he moved to dump it in the kitchen sink. He didn’t rinse the glass, afraid to smudge the mark left by his father’s lips.

Floyd had first encountered grief when he was six and a great-uncle had died of coronary heart disease. Floyd had met him only once. Still, he cried into his pillowcase, his mother and father curled around him. “Everyone has to go sometime,” one of them had said, though he couldn’t recall which.

Now, in the living room, his mother was taking his father’s books off the shelf and carefully inspecting each dust jacket. He walked to her and placed his hand over the copy of the Bible at the end of the row, tugging it free.

He hadn’t wept during or since the funeral, but felt his eyes burn as he studied the veins stretching across his mother’s hands. They seemed to pulse underneath her skin, coiled and plump. She looked so frail in the sunlight; he wondered how long she would last.

The room felt hotter then, the air thickening with a terrible sorrow. Floyd screwed his eyes shut as pitiful, sad sounds wrenched themselves from his throat. He imagined a second casket being lowered into the ground — white with gold trim. He remembered the funeral home, the smell of dust and formaldehyde and the way his mother looked as she signed the check for companion plots. For a moment, Floyd felt outside of himself. He watched in slowed time as his mother moved to hold him and tuck his head into her shoulder. Her perfume was suffocating, as deep and earthy as his sobs were loud and shrieking. Floyd lifted his head and she cooed at him the way mothers do at infants, her hair brushing against his cheek as they parted.

They stood close to each other for several minutes, eyes fluttering as if each was trying to find something lost in the space between them. Fixing his gaze upon her, Floyd knew at once that this was the way of things and slipped the Bible back onto the shelf.