Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
by Phebe Jewell
The dead man can’t be bothered to show at his funeral. Sure, they’ll put his body in the ground, but he will stay far from the crowd of people public-weeping, singing his praises now that he is gone when alive he was only good to unclog their drains, mend their fences, paint their walls. He’ll miss seeing his nephew join the pallbearers, the same nephew who packed a truck and drove toward a different future after watching his uncle smile and scrape for a few measly bucks, always on the lookout for the next job thrown his way. But now, in the maze of the afterlife, the dead man follows his own pace, twisting and turning towards then away from the center. At the gravesite only his nephew, lifting the coffin to this shoulder, understands that the dead man is nowhere near. Balancing the weight of loss, the nephew trudges along compact earth while the old man wanders free, not yet ready to be laid to rest.
Phebe Jewell’s recent work appears in Molotov Cocktail, Reckon Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Does It Have Pockets?, and elsewhere. Read her at phebejewellwrites.com.
