FICTION

Crashing Funerals

Crashing other people’s funerals produced its own sense of euphoria

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The dead man’s eyes were closed, as dead eyes always were. I found myself wondering what color they were, beneath those glued shut eyelids. Such a morbid curiosity, yet I couldn’t help it. His name was Jerry, at least that’s what the funeral program said right beneath the picture I figured must have been at least three years old. He looked much different dead, but who wouldn’t?

I watched enough cable to know what happens to bodies when they die. Aside from the physical reaction of the body’s cells dying, there were all those procedures done on you by those calling themselves funeral directors, but who were really nothing more than human butchers. Ghastly procedures, if you ask me, hardly believable in the face of the modern funeral. But horror hides. And I know that somewhere in the basement of the building in which I now stood terrible things were done to Jerry’s body.

Not that I cared. I didn’t even know Jerry. I was attending his funeral only because I’m a thrill seeker, living on the edge of life, as least as much on the edge as a 38 year old single woman can get. Granted, I wasn’t exactly jumping out of airplanes, but crashing other people’s funerals produced its own sense of euphoria. Euphoria that Jerry…