by Emily Hall
After Alice makes her own funeral arrangements, she drives twenty miles to the next town, where there’s a little dingy diner that still serves turtle soup. No one else she knows will eat it (her younger sister Maeve wrinkles her nose at the mere memory of it), but when the young waiter places it in front of Alice with a tentative expression, she showers oyster crackers over the briny broth.
Savoring the gelatinous segments, Alice thinks back to the funeral home, how the showroom had more options than she could have imagined, caskets with pink velvet interiors, shiny black lids, and ornate handles, and she’d spent nearly an hour browsing, only to choose a simple wooden one with a delicate pattern carved along its top.
Initially, she hadn’t planned to go alone; before she’d left for the appointment, she’d asked Maeve to go with her, but her sister had made excuses, reminding Alice with a smirk that she was seven years younger, so funerals weren’t on her horizon. When she’d said this, Alice had smiled, because even as a kid Maeve had looked away from death, unable to watch their mother pluck the chickens they’d have for supper or see their father come back from the shore with a crate of turtles whose beaks snapped hopelessly at the sky.
As she rests her spoon next to the empty bowl, Alice gives thanks that she and her sister are so different; that when she bent over her casket, she didn’t feel fear as she expected, but instead, a quiet understanding that one day she’d be tucked inside that box so the ground could swallow her up in one, satisfying bite.
Emily Hall’s prose appears, or is forthcoming in, places such as Passages North, 100 Word Story, Blood Orange Review, Cherry Tree, and Does It Have Pockets. She’s an editor for Pictura Journal and lives in North Carolina with her husband.
Photo Credit: by Ivo Santos on Unsplash
