The Old Taker
First Funeral
The worst funerals are the ones where the casket is small. The mourners file in to a tiny, slightly poor brand of funeral home with that weight on their back: the knowledge that this funeral's happening far too soon, and most of them should never have lived to see it. It's a burial that should be occurring five or six or eight decades into the future. Whatever one believes, by all the laws of nature or of God, one thing that all people know is that you are meant to have a life before you die. This girl never got hers. She skipped straight to the end- and now a room full of people dressed in black are here to commemorate that. It almost feels wrong. Here we are, a bunch of men and women who lived our childhoods a long time ago and had the chance to grow up. Sorry that you won't get to.
The dearly beloved who are gathered here today might be sensing that irony, the way they sort of float around the room tragically and have short, painful conversations with one another that lead to nowhere. Nobody knows how to act. There's a couple of teenage relatives of the deceased who, not genuinely meaning any disrespect, are leaned against the lacquered wood of the walls. Maybe twenty feet of space from one wall to another in here. The air. It's thick. And there's something that none of the mourners have yet seen, standing behind the casket.
The one person who's seen the Thing behind the casket is her brother, who is terrified and trying desperately hard not to look at it again. He's only eight years old. That is, in fact, exactly how his mother is answering the question that all the relatives are asking: “Oh, how old has your Jamie gotten to be now?” They ask it because it's easier and more comfortable than talking about the girl in the box. Any other day, if they were in any building except for this building, and if they were doing anything other than what they're here doing, Jamie would've corrected his mother. “I'm not eight, I'm eight and a half!” He’d feel righteously indignant about it, too. That's vitally important to him. Those six months since he turned seven are nothing to the grown-ups, barely a blink of an eye, but they’re an eternity to him. For a child, lifetimes pass between birthdays.
That thought suddenly seems to matter a lot to him- birthdays. There's something about birthdays. He can’t quite figure it out. His mom pulls him by the shirt-sleeve when it’s time to sit down and- not wanting to be yelled at in front of all these people, because he knows his mother will absolutely do that- he does squeeze down into the little funeral house pew. There’s an ancient man in a suit standing in front of the sister’s body who looks ready to start talking. He was introduced, Jamie thinks, as Pastor Redmond. This is the first funeral that Jamie has ever attended, but he already instinctively has the feeling that the Pastor is "just doing his job," the way adults like to say it. He has never seen this man before in his sister's life.
Makes it seem weird that he'd be the one doing the speaking, doesn't it? But the boy is able to look up at him talking without having to focus too much on the thing that's behind him, the huge thing that's behind the casket. And that's a small mercy. Pastor Redmond has that caved-in look, the sunken-in kind of cheeks and eyes that you'll only see on the fantastically old or the incredibly ill. Mr. Redmond may just be both. He has to stand with the help of his podium- Jamie imagines him falling down and crumbling to dust on the floor without it. Arms and legs are just bones with a lifetime of skin sloughing off of them. The same as his face. When he speaks, it is watching a corpse speak. His casual scan over the audience passes over Jamie and their eyes lock, and when that happens this kid not even ten years old yet suddenly feels sick and pale and so, so old, too. And dead. Really, that's the main thing. The old man's eyes make him feel dead. As old as Redmond and as dead as his sister.
Jamie squirms uncomfortably, he looks away.
He thinks that might just be the oldest man that he's ever seen. Jamie didn't know it was even possible to be that old and still taking in breath. He decides that, actually, he doesn't wanna look at the pastor, either. He wastes away the rest of the eulogy focusing instead on the eldritch patterns to be found in the soft fabric seat of his pew. And occasionally- just so long as it doesn't mean lifting his head and having to look up at those two monsters again- he listens in.
Jamie feels like he'd do the eulogy pretty differently, if he could. The old Pastor talks about "this time of grief," the way in which many can feel shaken by events like this, the counseling services offered, but they all sounds like nothing-words. What should the eulogy have been about? Bugs, he thinks. Olivia, for some stupid reason, liked bugs. She liked them in the way that normal kids are supposed to like video games or ponies. This eulogy, Jamie thinks, should be about bugs- it's what his sister would want. Like the time that she dragged Jamie out by the arm (he was always too small to resist his sister, the poor boy) to look at a Lady Bug she'd caught roosing up in the lowest-hanging of the backyard leaves. "Girls shouldn't like bugs," Jamie informed his older sister, while she was prodding away at it with a twig 'cause she wanted to see what it looked like flying. "Bugs are a boy thing." He knew that he was right, "just like he knows the sky is blue and rain is wet," as his dad would say, but she didn't listen to him. Not then, not the other times.
He remembers another day. A Friday, it was Family Movie Night, as every Friday is in the esteemed Fitzgerald household. They all voted democratically on what to watch. Mom voted for Bridge to Terabithia. Jamie voted Monster House. Olivia voted to watch a documentary about bugs instead of what Jamie would've called a "real movie." Jamie remembers, he was really protesting that one. He thought this was ridiculous- he was loud about it. But Olivia was always their father's favorite, and in the end, he voted with her. They watched the science documentary. It felt unfair. He hated it then and he hates it now. But that's what Jamie would tell the eulogy about.
He catches the fat, plump tears running away down his cheeks before anyone else has the chance to see them. Pulling up a handful of his mom's nice expensive dress, he wipes it right across his face. At first his mother looks down with an expression of horror- but then she figures out why he's doing it. She looks back up to Pastor Redmond's preaching and says not a word.
Now he realizes why the thought of birthdays was important. It's because Olivia is having no more.
A couple of months away from her eleventh birthday. Olivia's out playing in the summer freedom, she sees something on the other side of the road. (Maybe it was a bug, maybe a school friend- nobody knows.) She goes to cross the street, and at the same time there's an alcoholic behind a steering wheel driving on it. It was so random. It'd be one thing if it was evil, if there was some cruel killer that had meant to take her life. But the killer here was just a stupid, stupid drunk, and Jamie saw the body before it was all cleaned up. He doesn't think he'll ever forget. No, that's not true. He knows he will never forget.
He's interrupted. Mom is tugging at his sleeve, again, always her preferred way of telling him to start moving. The sound of everyone getting up out of their pews at once makes Jamie get up, too, not even thinking about it really. He's not thinking much about what's going on at all anymore, all lost in those deep memories of Olivia and her killer, and that's how it gets him. As everyone stands for the end of Pastor Redmond's sermon, nearly time to start the sad manual labor of bearing out her body, Jamie's eyes drift up to where the casket is. His eyes drift up to the casket, and this time he's forgotten to avoid looking at what is behind it.
What does an eight year old call something that he knows nobody else can see, and that, to him, is the Worst Thing in the World? He calls it a monster. That's what the thing is to Jamie. He can't figure out what it looks like. Not from when he was only seeing it from the corners of his eye, and not now that he's staring it right down from the pew. It has arms, like a human, but human arms don't stretch from one wall to the other. It has a white and frog-like hand stretched all the way to the upper left corner of the funeral parlor, and the other stretched all the way up to the right corner. It's body isn't any bigger than a man's, it might even be smaller, but the mouth is huge. It's standing there as motionless as a paused video, with a wide, cartoonishly stretched-out open mouth that Jamie is terrified could fit his entire body inside. Its big enough that it seems like it could dive down and swallow up Olivia's casket in one gulp. Like the snake swallows the egg. It's naked.
None of the other mourners reacted to it when they came in. None of them ever will. And it doesn't even move. But Jamie knows- he knows- that it's there.