Ablution

Winner of the Margaret Lamb Fiction Prize at Fordham University, NYC. Published in the Fordham Observer. 

Curtains drawn throughout the village, mirrors put to bed. The women, sisters wives and mothers will play pallbearers for a generation.

Gareth’s body was still warm when his mother undressed him to be washed. She had done this a thousand times when he was a child and occasionally as a teenager too. His father thought it would be a laugh to get the skinny little boy drunk with the lads. Passed out cold. Coal dust still on his face.

He wasn’t the skinny little boy anymore though. Look at him. She was the proud mother of a handsome man. Strong. The three years he had put-in underground sculpted his wiry arms into muscular cutting instruments. His shoulders now like his fathers, broad and a little round.

She lifted his right arm and ran the sponge from his shoulder to his wrist. The water fell heavy on the slate floor and the kitchen table held pools of the dirty runoff in its oaken grooves. The flame of the candle danced to the whistling draft from the rattling old windows of her grey stone house.

Her mind wondered…

Manon had always wanted a big family. She imagined Christmas around a fireplace with a big big tree and square parcels. She imagined a Christmas like the Nobles would have. Loud, succulent and full of charm. Gareth her only son and only child was never one for Christmas, never one for the event. Like his father, he hated the attention, even from his own mother.

She put her sons hand to rest on the warm wet sponge. The warm water would loosen up some of the coal dust under his short nails. She turned to get a small blunted knife from the kitchen drawer, and as she came back to face Gareth again, she marveled at the gleaming wet body lying bare on her kitchen table. She would have to bury him in the same ground that killed him.

Dead before he came up.

Dead before his time.

Dead next to his father.

Dead by the force of dust and mine shaft debris.

Her grief blacker than coal.

She sang a song for the dead.