The hot June sun beat down on the rippling lake water, which in turn beat against the sandy shoreline of the lake house’s property. Birds dove in between the lime green foliage up above, and bees hummed back and forth between the endless bouquets of flowers. People lowered their voices to a whisper the nearer they got to the coffin, Henry noticed, though he never quite understood why. As perhaps unsentimental as it sounded, it wasn’t like they could hear you. For all the murmuring, however, they felt free enough to blast the body’s “favorite songs”, often ‘80s one hit wonders Henry wasn’t sure was anybody’s “favorite” anything, and chew with their mouths wide open, dripping vodka sauce down the fronts of their bleached white button-ups and smooth black dresses. The Body lied flat and still, clean and powdered. It lay in a state almost in between life and death. People often say it’s after the last person on Earth thinks of you that you die. It seemed to Henry, while he stood among the strange and unfamiliar faces in the mourning crowd, melting into the throng of black and white bodies and tear-stained cheeks, that you really died the last time anybody saw you breathing and blinking and laughing: not dressed up like at any moment you might sit up from the grave and perform some kind of a morbid tap dance routine.
Henry thought all of this to himself, pent up grievances and pet peeves flipping back and forth through his mind with every click of his 35 mm Canon. A fly rubbing its greasy palms together on a discarded crust of bread. A patch of dead grass. A dried-out worm, inches from the salvation of the cool, dark shade of a pine tree. But though Henry thought all of these things privately, when the grieving widow or the dark, conflicted teen made eye contact with him, if even for a second, he knew he didn’t believe them. He couldn’t believe them. He grieved as much as they did. Even their neighbors, or the mailman or the cashier at the supermarket did. Like a frantic bird who comes home to a ravaged nest, death is a scene which only plays out in our worst nightmares.
Henry sat in the back of the smattering of tables and chairs occupied by elderly friends of the body, nieces and nephews and everything in between. He dug his fork into the tender flesh of a chicken breast smothered in tomato sauce, wiggling it slowly, back and forth, grinding the meat into shreds slowly but surely. He watched the mourners laugh and cry and nod and pull memories from the far corners of their minds, thinking back to times in bubble baths or family vacations. After a short while, Henry stood up and walked off to the rocks on the edge of the lake and removed a cigarette from his breast pocket, lighting it and taking a long, relieved drag off the end of it, closing his eyes and feeling every muscle in his body loosen. He liked to ignore the greasy feeling in his lungs, like a clogged car engine. He wouldn’t let himself cough, he just swallowed it, clenching his jaws even as dirty-tasting saliva built up all around the edges of his mouth. For Henry, smoking wasn’t something tied to death. It was fundamentally tied, in fact, to his life.
Often, Henry didn’t think smoking at a funeral was proper. He had even been kicked out of one for that exact reason. But this being his third one in as many days he figured he deserved it, and tried (and failed) to blow the smoke out over the water, whose steady, chilly wind blew it right back at him, almost like it wouldn’t let him pass it off to the rest of the lake. What was his was his. While he smoked, he could hear someone making an announcement, and he flicked the cigarette off into the rocks, discarding the last of the smoke over his shoulder, and raising the camera to his eye, closing his left and squinting his right, aiming for the perfect shot. He captured a man (who, it appeared, was the body’s son) looking down at the Body and beginning to give what seemed to be the final speech of the afternoon. A fly landed on the lens of the camera and Henry shooed it away. An old woman in a shimmering purple dress approached him, then, and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“Would you mind getting a picture of me and my son, Bobby, just over there?” Henry nodded.
“Of course,” he said. He was tired.
Henry remembered gifting his brother a pair of smooth, gold cufflinks, before his wedding. His brother had, in turn, had told him they looked ridiculous, like Henry was asking him to dress up as James Bond at his wedding. Henry felt hurt, knowing his brother hadn’t meant it, but that that was simply how he was. His brother smiled, then, and slipped them into his pocket with a knowing glint in his eye. Henry smiled and nodded and tried not to think about them for the rest of the day. Selfishly, he hoped everyone would see them and ask where they had come from, and Henry would be revealed as the thoughtful, watchful older brother he always fancied himself as. Now, Henry thought, it didn’t necessarily matter anyways. His brother was buried six months later, in the same suit he was married in. Henry liked to believe the cufflinks had remained there, in that small pocket, all the way down into the grave. One year later, Henry wondered if he was still trying to make up for something, a love that he wished those cufflinks might have conveyed to his brother which he himself never could.
The day ended in a grating Queen cover band’s take on “We Are the Champions” blasting from the speakers as the mourners slowly bowed their heads and said their goodbyes. As they trudged back to their cars, snippets of sentences and comments catching Henry’s ears, comments about the poor quality of the appetizers or the bugginess of the area. For Henry, to not look at the Body meant he could tell himself it wasn’t there, however untrue that was on any given day. The Body didn’t need its eyes open for Henry to know he was being watched. As the crowd thinned, Henry turned and pointed his camera to the small stage which had been erected for the band, snapping a shot of the lead singer, decked out in hair band regalia. Off to the side of the frame, barely poking through, was the unmistakable edge of the coffin.
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