ISSUE 20 - Fall 2025

Fiction

Oracle

Colleen Morrison

The last time Gavril ate a real cottage pie, his mother had still known how to hum. She'd murmur low and steady while peeling potatoes, the tune weaving through the steam of simmering gravy. He missed both—the song and the taste—and that longing had led him to the edge of the woods, his feet shuffling along the dry-packed dirt.

People were forgetting things. It had been happening for years, but only recently had Gavril started to notice. Only recently had the forgetting begun to take his own mother.

It had been just the two of them for years. He spent his days helping on the farms beyond town, while she kept the house running—preparing meals, scrubbing, tending to the daily rituals that kept life steady.

She’d begun forgetting last fall, small things slipping first. She asked three times one morning where the eggs were, though they’d always sat in the same faded green bowl by the window. It progressed quickly, taking the everyday things, too—cooking, hanging clothes. Eventually, it took the things she loved.

Gavril used to come home to the sound of her singing, but one day, she’d forgotten how. He’d walked in, expecting to hear the soft trill of her voice, only to be met by the sibilant sound of the radiator and the heavy stillness of the kitchen. The house was quiet most evenings now, and the food was abysmal. He’d taken over cooking after she couldn’t anymore, but she’d forgotten enough by then that he couldn’t get any recipes from her.

Mostly, bland food was tolerable, but Gavril would have done anything for a cottage pie. It was what he missed most after his mother, and soon, the two became intertwined in his mind. Morning, noon, and night, Gavril thought about that cottage pie. The buttery scent of mashed potato browned just right. The sizzle as the gravy bubbled up through a crack in the crust. The way the first bite nestled into his ribs.

He’d been lamenting to Jakob in town about the pie yesterday when the Oracle in the woods had come up.

“Right past the creek, where the ground slopes down,” Jakob said. Gavril vaguely remembered playing around there as a child—a glimmer of tadpoles in the creek, knees slick with mud.

“What does it do?” he’d asked, his mind whirring.

Jakob had twisted the piece of wheat between his teeth, whistling low. “The Oracle knows everything. Speaks with a million voices, apparently, so it can tell you anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Anything,” Jakob confirmed. “I bet it could get you that recipe.”

Gavril thought about it for a moment. “What does it cost?” 

Jakob’s face twisted strangely.

“Not a thing,” he replied. Gavril thought it seemed too good to be true—nothing was free in this life.

Gavril wasn’t going to do it, but when he’d returned home that night, he’d found his mother standing in the middle of the room.

“I don’t remember how to fall asleep,” she’d whispered.

He’d decided to seek out the Oracle at daybreak.

Now, he was crossing through the quiet wood, moss and lichen-coated logs bordering the well-traveled path. The ground was covered in pine needles, the sounds all muffled and softened besides that of the nearby creek.

“Hello?” he called softly as he reached the water, expecting no reply and flinching when he got one.

“Ask anything,” the voice replied. It did sound like the voices of millions—garbled and distorted.

Gavril felt strange here, as though he was entering into a fool’s bargain. Jakob had said there was no cost, but the prickle at the back of Gavril’s neck made him nervous. His fingers twitched at his sides, and he kept glancing back the way he came, as though the path might disappear.

“Can you tell me how to make a meat pie?” Strangely, Gavril almost expected the Oracle to laugh at him, but there was no response—no emotion. Just a simple answer.

“Yes.”

It gave him the recipe, step by step, leaving no details undisclosed. The voice never paused, never stumbled. At the end of it all, Gavril waited for the Oracle to claim its cost, but it simply bid him farewell.

“Until next time,” it said, but Gavril knew there wouldn’t be a next time. He had what he’d come for.

When he made the cottage pie, exactly as directed, it had been perfect. At the first bite, the warmth bloomed on his tongue, the crust giving way with the same satisfying flake, the meat still tender, seasoned just right. He nearly cried—it tasted just how he remembered his mother’s. He made it every night that week, perfect and flakey and crisp, the directions from the Oracle etched in his mind. 

Even his mother enjoyed it with eyes brighter than he’d seen them in months. She smiled—really smiled—and for a second, she looked like the woman he remembered, humming at the stove.

But then, on the eighth day, it started to taste wrong. The crust would burn, the flavor turning acrid, the gravy clumping irreparably. 

Gavril couldn’t figure out if he was missing an ingredient, if something was wrong with his oven. It was driving him to obsession trying to figure it out. He talked to himself, muttering lines of the recipe like a prayer. His mother couldn’t help—she didn’t remember the recipe anymore. And he couldn’t remember the cookbook where he’d first seen it, either.

He complained about it to his friend in town. It had taken him a moment to remember what he’d come for—Gavril’s memory wasn’t what it once was. He and Jakob sat on the old stone wall, chewing pieces of wheat as he told him of his cottage pie plight.

Maybe tomorrow, he would go to see the Oracle that lived in the woods that everyone spoke about. They said it had a million and one voices with which to speak.

With a B.A. in English and Creative Writing, Colleen Morrison enjoys crafting stories that explore strength in the face of adversity and the sometimes dull horrors of day-to-day life. When she's not making questionable Google searches for research, you can find her exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains with her family, reading, or gathering inspiration for her next project.

A Held Breath

Richard Jacobs

When they struck his ear, the first notes made him think of fishes breaking through the surface of a river, leaping over the spray of water. He paused during his chore to listen. The next wave of notes sounded like the fish diving back in. He finished storing the glasses and plates from supper in the cupboard and stepped in sock-feet to the front room. Sue was playing the piano. The boys had gone to bed; he’d heard their prayers and tucked them in himself. Sue played from memory, her eyes wide open, watching now her fingers, now the mahogany headboard, now a picture in her mind. Her piano-playing expression was like her sewing or gardening expression—determined. Her cheeks blushed, paled, blushed again. From the room’s threshold Dan felt a great longing, an abiding one, and he closed his eyes to bear it: he could not enter this part of his wife’s life. Though she did not withhold it from him, her music was part of her secret life, like her dreams and the thoughtful silences that could whisk her away from him at any time, part of her inner life that rang, he believed, in richer chords than his own.

In its unfolding the song called to mind a hope Dan had always kept to himself, his private vision of contentment. He and Sue lay on a quilt in a verdant glade at the rim of a forest, reading (for Dan would read, if he were as well off in leisure as he was in love). Braced against a mossy rock and within arm’s reach, a basket brimming with fruit, bread, and wine awaited opening. Nearby, a stream spoke in lucid syllables, headlong in its zeal to feed the blue lake they could barely see through a break in the trees. There Jeff and Willie played and splashed each other with Will and Helen, Dan’s parents, and Alma, Sue’s mother, watching from the shore. Wildflowers sprang from tufts in the swale of the glade while stitches of sunlight winked like daytime stars on the grass. The sky, a cerulean heaven mapped by a range of wispy clouds, stole Dan’s and Sue’s faces from the pages of their books. Butterflies bobbed in and out of the shafts of light, and birds fluted from the trees. The air, fresh and warm, drew from the flowers, grass, and Sue’s loaf of bread their most intense fragrances. The others would play and swim for another hour. Unobserved, Dan and Sue stacked their books and opened their arms to each other. The quilted grass beneath them proved to be as comfortable as their long-owned feather mattress. This open-air bed, no roof above it but the undulating leaves, bewitched them into an abandon they rarely permitted themselves at home, their boys asleep but close by in their rooms.

But Will was gone now, irretrievably gone except in memory, buried two weeks ago today. This afternoon, Dan had touched the flinty mound of clay that covered him. A scattering of fresh blades of grass already framed the grave.

Just in time, for Dan, looming in the doorway, had learned how death could alter even a harmless fantasy, the notes from the piano touched him like Sue’s caresses. He opened his eyes and watched his wife’s wrists rebound, watched her elbows lift forward when she stroked the black keys. He marveled at her sense of balance, the ease with which she navigated the intricate passage. Dan held his breath: he loved her so. He remembered without shame his fretting away of the evenings of Sue’s visit with Alma in July, how he’d mourned their three-night separation. Here, in her solitary skill she seemed complete, sufficient unto herself. He wondered if she was happy in the life they’d made together. Before his father’s sudden illness struck, no other substantial worry had besieged him in years. When she finished her song and turned to find him there, he with his anxious face, she unveiled a smile that met him like a sought blessing.

He asked, hoarsely, “What’s the name of that piece?”

“It’s ‘Impromptu in G Flat Major, Opus 90, number 3.’ Shubert.” She wrinkled her nose with pleasure at his look of dismay, then moved to her left, set her book on the floor, and patted the bench. “What would you have named it?”

Sitting by her, he scowled at the presumption but tried to answer truly. “Maybe ‘Summer Afternoon by a Woodstream’?”

“That’s nice.”

“Or just ‘Peace.’”

She touched his arm. “Do you feel peaceful?”

He studied the keys. “I do at this moment.” He brought his right thumb above middle C, spanned his carpenter’s fingers, and played in a slow tempo the single song he could. It was ‘Papa Haydn.’

Sue let him finish, then lay her head on his shoulder.

“It’s still hard,” he said.

“Yes.”

He needed to make his meaning clear. “Not having Dad.”

“I know.”

She kissed his neck and wiped away a stain left by a tear, hers, then drummed the keyboard. “When we were first married, you promised to let me teach you to play.”

“Oh lord.”

“Perhaps now’s the time to begin,” she said. “Watch.” She played the first notes of ‘Take Me Out to The Ball Game,’ the only tune Will would ever request of her when he and Helen visited them.

Dan tried to copy her, hesitantly. But encouraged by her nods, he fingered the keys with more daring, less impatience at his blunders. At the end of his try they laughed together. Sue pressed the sustaining pedal. Dan breathed out, and the lilting final note reverberated about them.

Richard Jacobs lives in Pennsylvania. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, the Penmen Review, October Hill Magazine, the Lindenwood Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Euphony Journal, Inscape, and the Bookends Review. He is at work on a novel.

Cocoon

Emma Nagle

The string is there to make everything clear.  To draw connections and straight lines, to illuminate and elucidate.

I don’t have to think, I just open my eyes, even though this is not necessary either, and feel my way to the bathroom using the twine running from my bedpost to the towel rack.  When I’m finished, I am guided to the stove and breakfast.

The trouble is, I can no longer open the refrigerator door.  It’s difficult to draw a seat at the table, and I have grown familiar with the pain of forgetting the salt and pepper in the cabinet.  Everything is such a nuisance when you get tangled in your own house.

The map of my everyday paths is always evolving.  I am always cutting and tying knots and modifying.  Sometimes I get carried away and end up trapping myself in a cocoon of intentions.  If I don’t have my scissors with me, well… It's a bit of a predicament that can require gymnastic skills beyond my natural scope to escape from.  My mother usually saves me.  Between my father and I, she’s gotten quite used to this sort of thing.

I call her for help today – I have no choice – and when she opens the front door, there is a small young girl standing on the stoop, too, her smooth hand covered in my mother’s rather larger wrinkled one.  “This is my neighbor’s daughter.  I babysit her after school.”

The girl holds a balloon in her other hand.  I close my eyes because I can’t stand balloons.  Balloons are so twitchy and contradictory: the sky is the very definition of nothing, but balloons see a promise and a potential in it.  Whether they’re deluded or hopeful or selfish, I’m not sure – but they always make sure to bring their strings with them out of habit, perhaps, but it's a useless effort – they’re not coming back.  A child will never hold them again.  Why am I like this?  I get so worked up over things so small.

“Where are the scissors?”  My mother’s lips are rolled into a stern line.

“My nightstand.”

She stomps up the stairs with irregular footsteps, dodging the obstacles.

As one might imagine, I don’t have guests very often; people usually grumble, “To each their own,” and decline future visitations.  The girl, however, seems to take everything in stride.  She ties her balloon to her wrist and jumps to grab hold of a strand several feet above her head.  Swinging her weight back and forth as casually as if she were on a jungle gym, she asks me with great solemnity, “Why is everything in your house on a leash?”

I tell her the only thing in my house on a leash is me.

“And my balloon.”

“And your balloon,” I amend.

“My class caught caterpillars last week, and we put them in a cage with some leaves and things.  But this morning there were no caterpillars, only these green droplets dangling from a stick.”

I don’t say anything.

“My teacher told us the caterpillars are inside the green droplets, and that when they come out again, they will be butterflies.  Is that what you are trying to do in that cocoon?  Grow wings?”

“No.”  But I’m not sure.

The girl nods seriously.  “You don’t need wings to fly anyways,” she says, bouncing her balloon.  “Can I watch TV?”

A pixelated summer day, chattering with buoyant, idyllic colors, soon stretches across my television screen.  And there hangs hopeless, good ol' Charlie Brown, upside down in the Kite-Eating Tree, round face reddening in shame.  “Ha,” the girl shrieks, “he looks like you.”

I’m not insulted.  I like this girl and her exuberant pigtails.  Half an hour later, the door slams behind her and my mother, but there is a string stretching from her wrist to mine.  I watch through the window as the girl examines it admiringly, as if it is a pretty, new bracelet.

That was weeks ago now.  I tug on the string all the time to feel the pinch against my skin.  The walls keep muttering – I know I’m cracking up, I don’t need you or my mother to tell me.  I am the predator, and I am the prey – living in a web like a spider, spinning webs like a spider, but rubbing my hands together in worry like a fly.

I imagine a balloon getting its wish, centimeters away from a cloud, its string extending down, down, down to the hand of a crying child.

My dog trots up to tie me on a leash.  Time for a walk.  But I don’t have a dog, and I already have a leash.  I told somebody that.  Who?  Oh right, the girl.

I see her balancing on the line in front of me like an acrobat, arms sticking out, balloon bobbing, TV remote in the pocket of her overalls.  “Look,” she giggles.  “Easy as pie.”

My father tripped and fell and died over a cable on his way to the kitchen.

Charlie Brown blinks at me from his tree.

“You even have string tied to the ceiling, for God’s sake!”  My mother is back.  She makes a snip, leaving the end attached to the chandelier, and the girl, out of nowhere, leaps and latches onto the strand.  She swings alarmingly, spinning at a dizzying rate, and, next second, she goes sailing out the window.

I feel a tug on my wrist, and out I fly after her.

Emma Nagle is a high school student who enjoys the journey of writing. 

Content Warning: The following story contains graphic descriptions of animal cruelty. 

The Turtle

Jocelyn Craig-Golightly

All summer, Dani plays outside. Sometimes she wishes she had a sister to play with, but she doesn’t mind playing alone. She’s used to it, and anyway, it means she gets to imagine whatever she likes and there’s no one to boss her around. When her mother is home, she has to be careful not to get too dirty, or she’ll be in trouble. Somehow the knees of her blue jeans always seem to end up covered in mud or grass stains, or worse, torn. She balls them up and pushes them all the way to the back of the closet, behind the hamper, but her mother finds them anyway.

 “You’re a young lady!” she scolds, usually adding in a tired voice, “When will you learn to act like it?”

 Dani has never understood the reasoning behind this thinking. She’s a girl, isn’t she? Which is the same as a lady who’s young, so however she acts, she’s acting like a young lady. Of course, she knows what her mother means, that she’s not supposed to mess up her clothes, or run around too much, or be too loud. She’s not supposed to climb trees or play swords with sticks or make mud pies. She just doesn’t see how any of this is logical. Girls can climb trees as well as boys can, so why shouldn’t they? Dresses are itchy and uncomfortable, and tea parties are boring anyway.

 This week, though, her mother’s gone all the way across the country for a work thingy and won’t be home until Friday, so Dani can do as she pleases. Her father never tells her to act like a lady, and he’s too distracted to notice the stains and tears in her clothing. So today, she’s building a fort in the wooded lot next to her house. There was some scrap wood near the dumpsters up the street where the new house is being built, and she found a hammer and a box of nails from the garage. The fort will be a secret world, hidden from the street, so she’s shoved her way back through the greenbriers, carefully avoiding the patches of poison ivy and the monkey arm vines trailing up the trunks of trees. Last summer, she got an oily, blistering rash on her arm that oozed and itched for weeks.

 She spots a couple of sturdy-looking oaks ahead. Sizing them up, she turns and looks out through the foliage back toward the street, and that’s when she sees it: a little box turtle. It claws its way through the grass and then awkwardly up and over the cement curb and onto the asphalt.

 Careful! she thinks, and takes a few steps toward it, kicking aside the thorny brambles. She means to pick the turtle up and deposit it safely on the far side of the road, but freezes as she notices two older boys walking up the street toward her and the turtle. She backs up, ducking behind the thick branches of a holly and crouching down to wait. They’re laughing the way teenage boys laugh, their voices sandpapery and cracking. Between the prickly, dark green leaves of the holly, she watches the taller one push a greasy lock of hair back from his forehead, peering toward the curb. His eyes fix on the turtle. She holds her breath.

 “Look at this!” he says to the shorter boy.

 Dani wants to step forward, to snatch the turtle away from them. But what can she say? This is her turtle? That’s stupid. Turtles don’t belong to anyone.

She stays hidden in the bushes as the shorter boy picks the turtle up and carries it into the street. The taller boy grabs the turtle, both of them laughing in those raspy voices again. She hates those voices. The shorter boy waves his hands in the air, yelling, “Over here!” and the taller boy tosses him the turtle. Catching it, he pretends to lose his balance, waving his arms around as if he’s about to drop the turtle before tossing it back.

No! Dani thinks, but she is frozen in place. Stop it! Just put it down! Inside her head, the words are so loud, but her throat is dry and her lips won’t move. She doesn’t recognize these boys from her school or from the bus stop on the opposite corner from hers where the middle schoolers wait, so they must be older than that, at least a few years older than she is. The shorter boy wears a letterman’s jacket and a backwards baseball cap. The taller boy, in a Tom and Jerry T-shirt and cargo shorts, has greasy hair that falls past his ears, parted in the middle like a skater.

They’re still tossing the turtle back and forth as if it were a football and not a living thing. Dani wonders if turtles can feel fear. Is it dizzy and disoriented, being thrown around like that? Behind the holly, she clenches her jaw tightly, her stomach full of rocks. She should stop them somehow, say something. But what? How? Glancing back through the trees toward her house, she wonders if her father is still in his study, if he can see the boys on the street through his window, whether he would do anything if he can.

Suddenly, the shorter boy throws the turtle back to his friend in a hard overhand. Yelping with surprise, the taller boy leaps aside and the turtle hits the pavement behind him with a sickening crack. Dani’s heart pounds. Move! she tells herself. Go! But her body ignores her pleas, staying rooted in the dirt and leaves.

“You asshole!” the taller boy says, his voice cracking, and they both laugh.

“Pick it up!” the shorter boy says.

They walk over to where the turtle lies in the street on its back, legs clawing the air in a helpless pantomime of walking. The taller boy nudges the turtle with his sneaker. Its legs keep thrashing in slow motion.

“Check this out,” the shorter boy says, gesturing to the side of the road, where an old sign post sits, a four-by-four set in concrete poured into an old tire. It’s heavy, but he rocks it back and forth by pushing on the post, lifting the tire off the ground. “Let’s smash it!”

For a moment, the taller boy looks dubious, a flash of hesitation rippling across his features, but then it’s gone. He kicks the turtle over onto its belly, its claws finally finding purchase on the asphalt as it slowly starts to move away.

“Lift it up! Come on!” he says, and the shorter boy rocks the post back and forth, lifting the tire up just high enough for the taller boy to shove the turtle toward it, under it, with his shoe.

Everything slows down as Dani watches. It seems to take forever for the turtle to slide under the tire, for the tire to drop down on its back with a terrible crunch. It takes long enough for her to have gotten up, to have run over to them, to have stopped them. Long enough for her to hear the screaming inside her own head, long enough to hate herself for being unable to move or make a sound. Her stomach churns violently, and for a moment, she’s terrified she’ll throw up and they’ll hear her, turn their attention to the little girl hiding in the trees, watching them.

From somewhere far away, as if through a long tunnel, she can hear them laughing and yelling “Gross!” and “Ew!” as they roll the tire out of the way and examine the results of what they’ve done. She can’t look. Only after they’ve continued up the street, out of sight, does she reach up and realize, startled, that her entire face is wet, her hair matted to her cheeks in wet clumps. She hadn’t even known she was crying. Her breath comes in sharp, ragged gasps now that she’s sure they won’t hear her. Her left foot has fallen asleep, and she has scratches on her arms from the brambles.

She doesn’t know whether they’ll retrace their steps, returning the same way they came. She’s got to move from here. Clawing her way through the thorns, she feels the hem of her jeans ripping but doesn’t care. She leaves the hammer, the nails, the wood. As she crosses the green lawn at the edge of the woods, around through the backyard with its grass mown in neat parallel lines, the sun is warm on her skin. The air is quiet except for the sound of an airplane passing somewhere overhead. She doesn’t look back toward the street. She can’t bear to see. Coward.

She slips in through the back door and kicks off her shoes. As she passes the study, her father calls out, “Bored already?”

“I’m just getting a snack,” she says, without stopping in front of the open doorway. She can’t let him see her face. In the kitchen, she opens and closes the pantry, and then the door of the refrigerator, so he won’t know she was lying about the snack. Then she goes up the stairs, to her bedroom, where she lies face down on the bed, unmoving, her jeans still covered in dirt and leaves, until she falls asleep.

The next day, Dani has to go with her father to the hardware store. He promised he’d finally hang the pictures in the bedroom before her mother gets back from her trip, so he needs picture wire.

“That’s funny,” he mumbles to himself in the garage as they get ready to leave. “I swear the hammer was in the toolbox. You haven’t seen it, Dani, have you?”

She shakes her head and looks away. He shrugs and opens the car door and gets in.

When they drive past the sign post, it’s hard to tell, because it’s on the opposite side of the street, but Dani doesn’t see anything on the pavement. No blood, no bits of broken shell. For a moment, she wonders if she imagined the entire thing, but the hollow feeling in her chest tells her she didn’t.

“How about we stop at Friendly’s and get an ice cream sundae on the way back?” her father asks as they pull onto the main road, leaving the neighborhood. “We haven’t done that in a while, huh, kiddo?”

“Okay,” Dani says, looking out the window. There’s a line of tiny scabs on Dani’s arm where she got scratched yesterday, and she picks at them absently. Outside, trees and leaves and patches of sky pass by in a blue-green blur.

Jocelyn Craig-Golightly grew up in Madagascar and the US. She currently lives in Germany with her wife, daughters, and cats.

Pale Skin and Crab Legs

CT Baldwin

The funeral home echoed with our pacing footsteps. Only two people paying respects at a funeral. It may seem a little sad. Pathetic even. However, don’t get it twisted, no one else was invited. It wouldn’t be appropriate. This is a two-person job. No one else needs to be involved in something they barely acknowledged. This sentiment was felt so strongly by the both of us, we even requested that the funeral director take a walk around the block a few times during our allotted time. He thought we were being ridiculous. 

“You may as well opt for cremation and be done with this silly business. What’s the point of an arrangement for something like this?” He had squealed.

Of course, we set him straight. We were paying him anyway, so what did he really have to complain about? The funeral home was a small two-room operation, ignoring the little closet that served as the director's office. It felt like destiny when we found the listing on Google. The wood floors were uneven and scratched like the place had once been a doggy daycare. There was only one window, which had a blackout curtain covering what would have been a depressing backyard filled with the trash of the neighbors. 

When it came to the casket, we spared no expense. The shell we chose was a cool pewter with goose feather cushions lined throughout the inside. Even from our skewed position on the other side of the room, I could see warped reflections mimicking us in the casket’s surface. A monument to our shared grief as well as a good chunk of our savings.

The entire slab was propped up on a large trolley with wheels, and the lay beneath a few bare bulb lights in the center of the room. A cheap stained glass image depicting a scene from John 11:28. A woman on her knees was conversing with, I assume, Jesus.  Another figure was out in the distance. Was he watching? Or arriving? Or maybe he was just existing. The only thing worthy of note in the entire building. 

            There was also a decent, if not inappropriate, spread on a long table in the back of the room. I don’t think I understand the need for food at a funeral. Who could manage to have an appetite with something like this? Eating should be saved for those moments that remind us to live, like weddings and birthdays. Why stretch our bellies more when they’re already bloated from grief? A stomach ache won’t outweigh the grief.

Anyways, we did agree to order food. It completed the look and that felt important, so I didn’t try to challenge the idea anymore. We opted for the “standard package” from the director, but I still have to admit, it felt a little absurd as he brought the options in and settled them on a black tablecloth. There were plates of pigs in blankets, little sandwiches, cheeses and meats, pickles, and, for some odd reason, crab legs sweating in an ice bucket along with a small selection of nonalcoholic drinks. The stench of old crab mixed with the lilac perfume favored by death became an overpowering force while we waited for the clock to move things along. Every tick of the clock felt like a renewed effort to make me hurl.

We had an open casket. It had to be to set our fears aside. We didn’t want to risk not knowing whether the dead might still have a pulse. When you can, there is nothing more definitive than looking at the diseased in their pale face. It allows for that silent conversation between the living and the mourned. The one where you come to understand the finality and the borders that will exist from now on. I kept trying to remind myself that not everyone has a chance at closure like this. It didn’t help. Closure is something you’re happy to have gone through years after the fact, but like a wisdom tooth extraction, it can hurt like hell in the moment.

The soles of my feet were beginning to ache from standing on the uneven floor with shoes I found at Goodwill. We spent so much on the funeral variables that I had overlooked the fact that I hadn’t dressed up in a very long time. The shoes were basic brown leather and might have been nice if they were newer, but as it was, they were so worn, it felt like I was standing on concrete. 

E. was on the other side of the room, rearranging the rows of empty chairs she insisted on to complete the scene. Each row ended with chrysanthemums and carnations arranged delicately by E. She had come first to ensure the deliveries all took place on time and the flowers were next to the casket as the most important piece of this farewell. Everything had to be just right. We only get one funeral, so it’s best to get things right. The last thing we want, thinking back to today, is regret.

The clock chimed noon. It was time. I walked toward the center aisle, and E. matched my pace until we met in the middle and linked our arms. She had the smallest smile—forced, obviously—then, arms intertwined, I set the pace toward the casket’s open mouth. E.’s arm loosened ever so slightly as the casket and reality grew closer. I couldn’t help but ponder the other way today could have gone. If we had been different people. If the hours had just fallen into place a little more snugly. 

E. stopped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my feet tingling, where we stood in the middle of the room.

“If we just don’t look, there’s a chance—” she started to say. I waited to see if she would finish her thought, but the air conditioner seemed to have blown her thoughts away. She kept her eyes trained on the monument in front of her, watching it like it might spring to life and take more.

“Chance is how this started,” I said softly, “and without us asking, fate’s taken control. There’s only one thing to do now.”

Her chin fell. I felt like my legs might fail me.

The monotone requiem of our steps continued again to echo through the funeral home until we were finally staring down into the contents of the death nest. Nestled in the delicately stitched cushions was an ornate mirror from which two people slowly broke apart from one another. This was the first time I managed to make eye contact with E. the entire day. I watched the pale faces within the mirror try to both look away and make eye contact with one another. It’s eerie seeing the end with open eyes, so when E. closed her eyes and backed away out of frame, I felt some relief. Yet, I kept looking into the half-empty box, trying to let the reality sink in.

“Please close it,” E. said from somewhere behind me. Taking the giant slab of a lid and lowering it, I watched the light within give out with a wink, then I placed the pall and casket spray overtop. It looked kind of pretty. Hard to believe inside would begin to crack and chip soon, probably as soon as it was tossed into its grave. 

“Ready to help me wheel this out?” I asked as I took a grip of one of the rails installed on the trolley that the casket sat on, but E. was nowhere to be seen. I was standing alone in the middle of the funeral home. From where I stood, it looked like the room was built on a lake. Floorboards rising and falling like the ripples caused by aggressive winds. Finally, looking outside, I saw her car start up and begin to pull out onto the road. The world still shifting wildly underneath me. 

Having seen one of us leave, the funeral director poked his head through the front doors, taking in the scene: A dozen empty chairs, a ghostly casket, a bucket of uneaten crab legs, and a man staring at a burden he feared was too heavy alone.

“Are you all done, yet?” He whispered, just loud enough to be heard over the hissing of the AC. His beady little eyes poked out from the door’s archway like an indoor cat trying to stalk its owner, waiting for the right chance to pounce.

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I started pushing the trolley toward the front door, causing the director to scurry away back into whatever bush he’d been hiding away in. Despite its massive size, the whole thing moved along the floorboards fairly well. The problem arose as I wheeled it out into the pothole-filled parking lot. The entire thing began to shake and bounce, and it took all my spatial awareness to avoid tipping the thing into one. That would be something: just bury the casket out here in the parking lot. There are enough holes waiting to be filled already. Eventually, I managed to drag the trolley through the lawn and toward the prepared burial site. The director was just out of my view, probably wondering how I expected to lower this burden 6 feet down. 

With the hole yawning out in front of me, I locked the front wheels of the trolley, pulled up on the back, and watched the entire $3,000 charade slide into the abyss with a sparkling ka-thunk. Staring down into the hole, I knew it was already broken. All that work. It didn’t have to be so abrupt. So soon.

As I walked away, I couldn’t help but think I heard something coming from the hole, but I didn’t have the strength to drop down and lift the lid alone to check. I had to remind myself: We checked. Both of us. We were sure. This is our end.

Suddenly, the day stretched on before me. Leaves rustled between my legs, and I tried to remember how long the crab legs had been sitting out. Were they safe to eat? My stomach felt so empty. 

The End 

CT Baldwin is an editor and teacher. He earned his MA in English Studies in 2021 from Kutztown University and now spends his free time writing and photographing birds. His poetry has been published in Shoofly Literary Magazine and Wishbone Words. CT can be found on Instagram @cbald95.