A Wake

     Nothing clears a room like the laughter issued from an open casket. Little Les is the first to go. His mother chuckles (perhaps forgetting for several moments that she’s facing a casket). The others—all seated in the rows behind, watch her shoulders quake.

     She turns to see who else is laughing, but all she sees are the stony faces of her grieving relations, hardened all the more by her lack of decorum. A clammy chill marches through her bones as the realization comes upon her. And the shrill sound of a woman shrieking erupts as she bolts for the open door, overturning every chair in her path.

     Laughter continues pouring from the casket like music from a phonograph. And while some wish to believe that the laughter is a practical joke, they do not stay to test their theories. Ten seconds more and all are gone—except for one cousin, Danielle.

     Perhaps Danielle’s sense of danger is defective, or perhaps she has a higher tolerance for morbidity than the rest. In either case, Danielle is known as the cousin who as a child made up games like ‘How Many Times Was The Dead Cat Run Over? ’and ‘Who Can Hold Their Finger In The Candle Flame Longest?’. She’s the cousin who leaves food out to rot on purpose. She’s the cousin… who presses her face to mortuary windows to watch the bodies being prepared.

     Danielle’s precariously fastened brooch hits the floor with a rattling sound as she steps toward the casket. The scarf covering her head slips, unveiling long strands of silvery hair as she steps around clusters of collapsed folding chairs. And the scarf is claimed by the rubber-capped foot of an overturned chair while Danielle is two steps from the casket.

     She peers in and sees plainly that Velma’s chest is heaving in time with the laughter. The unsuccessful attempts at containing her amusement cause formaldehyde-scented sweat to bead at her temples. Velma opens an eye with a quickness possessed only by those who’ve lied awake pretending to sleep for some time.

     Danielle gasps but does not step away.

     When Velma sees the smile spread across Danielle’s face she sits straight up in her casket. “Cousin, will you check my pulse?” she asks.

*****

     Outside by the duck pond there is a stand of willow trees. It is beneath these that the family gathers. Little Les, who hasn’t been afraid for quite some time, is trapped against his mother’s thigh, his skull confined by the curl of her fingers as she speaks. The others listen as though she were the expert on laughing caskets and all things dead.

     “Judy says I should’ve left Les at home today, but I think it’s important for children to attend. Why should adults be the only ones entitled to closure? Les is just nervous about saying bye to aunt Velma because visiting her in the hospital was so hard. You all know the kind of death she had.”

     “It’s horrible,” an aunt pipes in. “A person can’t lie in bed for a couple months without rotting away anymore. Tsk!”

     And the tsk-ing aunt’s husband adds, “With our shitty medical system we’ll be seeing more and more of this.”

     “More and more of what?” his wife demands, praying that there will be no answer.

      “We’ll see more and more people coming back to life like Velma has. More and more people, coming back to life to show how mad they are about dying of things like gangrene and gum disease!

You can bet that I’ll be coming back to haunt all those fuckers—”

     “Why do you have to come back to life? Why can’t you just be a ghost?” the wife asks, now praying for the wisdom to stop asking questions.

     “Because those nerds don’t get the point with ghosts anymore. Well I can guarantee they’ll shit their pants for the living dead!”

     “Oh Ed. Let’s listen to Lori, she was in the middle of saying something.”

     “Then stop talking,” he grumbles.

     “Like I said, Les was really scared. He still has nightmares about the smell. Telling him she got gangrene from lying in bed too long was a bad idea. He’s become an insomniac. Won’t stay in bed for more than two hours at a time. And when he gets up he comes to my room with a spatula and pokes me so I roll over. Poor Les.”

     Les obviously wants to join his cousins at the pond’s edge. He sees them squatting in the muck, flapping their arms like ducklings. Some of them see Les caught under his mother’s arm and quack a little. Les flaps the one arm that isn’t pinned against his mother’s leg.

     “I think he wants to play,” Ed’s wife’s sister says offering little Les an unwrapped breath mint, which he puts in his mouth, then looks to his mother pleadingly.

     “Alright, but don’t hurt yourself.” She tells him. “In a way I’m glad he’s gone, why torment the child by forcing him to hear about aunt Velma all the time?” she adds, once he’s joined his cousins. “He’s afraid because he heard that gangrene rots you to the bone.”

     “Oh! Who told him that?”

     “He overheard a couple of nurses talking. One of them was reminding the other to wash Velma’s bones.”

     “That can’t be true. You’re not alive if your bones are showing.”

     “I’m no doctor, but Les isn’t known to lie.”

*****

     “Let me check a little longer, the pulse can be very slow,” Danielle says to Velma.

     “Maybe this one’ll work better,” Velma proposes, presenting the other wrist’s underside to her cousin. Where pale translucent skin should be it isn’t.

     Danielle studies the inside of Velma’s wrist: flaccid blood vessels; bone ends wearing into each other; the strangely twisted tendons. The pieces don’t meet as they should. Tendons feed into painfully stretched blood vessels, cartilage forms over the raw ends of disconnected veins, and formaldehyde leaks from every part of the construction. “Do you want to die?” Danielle asks.

     “Die? It doesn’t have a thing to do with want.” Velma exclaims, holding nothing back this time. Her laughter is all howl and cackles. It makes its way to the microphone at the podium nearby and pours forth through wall-mounted speakers, filling the room twice over.

     Seeing that her cousin is only slightly put off by the outburst she continues speaking. “I was like this long before they swapped out my blood for this foul concoction,” she says, looking down at the liquid spurting from her wrist.

     “What do you mean this?”

     “It’s the part of old age they don’t tell you about Danielle. I’ve been using my kneecap as an ashtray for years. When I get congested, I just take the attachment off the vacuum and shove the hose into each lung. Clears me out real well. But you want to know what the downside is, don’t you?”

     Danielle lets out a half nervous laugh, pressing down on a new vein.

     Without warning Velma’s eyes fill with tears. “The worst is when the parts you actually like begin to go. I was reaching for a bottle of shampoo in the shower one day when thud! There was my crotch, inside out at the bottom of the tub. It was warm when I picked it up; a little clammy by the time I began sewing it back on. When I got up from the dinner table that evening it fell off again. For some reason, seeing it on the dinning room floor was much sadder than seeing it in the tub. Oh how I cried. I tried sewing it back on a few more times, but it wouldn’t stay. I had to trim away the tattered edges before sewing. Finally it was too small to sew, so I put it in a jar of oil.

     “The worst of the worst, besides not being able to have that special kind of fun anymore is wiping the little spaghetti that the pee comes out of. I never got used to that.

     Danielle sets her cousin’s wrist down on the skirt of her funeral dress. “I’m sorry, but you have no pulse,” she says, then asks, “What’s going to happen?”

     “Same as before, I lie here until they bury me.”

     “But you aren’t really dead.”

     Velma smiles, deviously one could say. “I’m not alive either.

Look cousin,” she says, grasping her chignon-style wig behind the ear and peeling it back. Several potato bugs scurry over the bare skin and the wires running from one side of her face to the other.

“My face is falling off and soon no one will talk to me.”

     Silence.

     Danielle nods.

     “Go and tell them whatever they thought they heard, it wasn’t me. Tell them to come back and bury me, I'll try not to laugh.”

Charlie Holland's work has appeared in The 2River View, 42opus, Skein, and in a chapbook put out by BREEDS LIKE A RUMRUNNER. I’ve been a featured reader at the Roundhouse, Bolts of Fiction, and the Vancouver Culture Crawl (2004).

Email: Charlie Holland

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