The Funeral

I had always thought funerals were events where people made up the time that they hadn’t spent with the deceased. It always felt like that, as long as they were. Perhaps they were like that so the audience could stew in shame, having not paid any attention before.

The current cell in which we were situated was a large cathedral, overly dramatic and pretentious in its size and splendor as it looked over the small town of Towson, Maryland. The only reason for its size seemed to be to keep a watchful eye on its citizens, and its current prisoners even moreso. The pews inside stretched far, but the end was in sight, every single one filled, not to the brim, but pretty close.

The afternoon sun shone all too lazily through the stained columns of glass, creating blazing, rigid conflagrations. The stained glass, as discrete from each other as they were, were nonetheless glass you’d find in any other large church of any other denomination. We could’ve been anywhere. But we were here, it was now, and it was long.

The current speaker was somebody that I had never seen before. She was in her mid-thirties and wore a black dress that revealed too much for the occasion. Nobody was listening to her eulogy, save for a few polite ones in the front, and even they were half-asleep. Her voice noted that she was from the South, a tinge of a bucolic, yet at the same time annoyingly slow drawl being present. The woman was dragging on with some anecdote and was seemingly gullible enough to believe that she had an audience.

From where I was, I could see a pair of women completely ignoring the tearful tale, and instead having a lively conversation in the fourth row, as if we were at a party. One, the blonde, had a strident laugh and covered it up with great difficulty. The other, a brunette, seemed to flip her hair too much, but was otherwise plain. Their gesticulated hand motions showed that, despite not being fully heard from every part of the church, they were as content as could be. They seemed to be convivial enough, the mourners in the immediate area thoroughly annoyed and giving sporadic looks of distaste.

The woman in black finally receded from the podium and took her seat in the front. A priest came out and replaced her.

His ludicrously bright robes seemed to clash with his old, tired face as he stepped into the path of the sunlight. He began his sermon, instantly becoming soporific and inducing sleep in more than a whole row in the back.

In the fifth row of the left section of pews a small blond boy had become figidity. He was discreetly attempting to untuck his shirt and had screwed his face in intense frustration. His mother, a tired-looking woman in her forties, noticed what her son was doing and scolded him. The boy complained about the length of the sermon, saying what everyone in the room had been thinking. The woman tried everything she could.

She at first lauded him for being ‘such a good boy for so long’, when in fact he had been making small tears in his hymnbook and folding its malleable spine into ungodly positions for the last hour out of boredom. Second, she decided to fabricate a story about how they would get ice cream after the funeral. The boy saw through her overly-used lie and pulled at his shirt harder. The woman looked over expectantly at her husband, who was purposefully acting nonchalant so as to avoid getting into the argument. She sighed, and as a last resort, the exhausted mother began to threaten her son.

The priest was halfway through his speech and had no idea what was going on. He was too busy belaboring the need for contributions in his sermon and for the most part didn’t pay attention to anyone in the room. If he had been, he would’ve seen the need to abridge it; he was losing his audience fast.
The boy and his mother were still arguing, growing increasingly louder. The mother reiterated her threats as she tugged at the boy’s shirt, the boy doing the same. The kid became more violent as he flailed. The woman was losing her grip and tried desperately to calm him, but people were starting to look. The boys hair thrashed about and he broke lose of his mother. She attempted to grab him again, he tried to fend her off with the torn hymnbook.

Anarchy broke loose, he screamed. It reverberated across the glass. The priest stopped. The chatty women were silenced. The people in both the back and the front woke up. The boy jumped into the aisle, threw the book aside, and stomped towards the back. His mother followed after him. The torn pages settled in the aisle. The father looked down. The priest blinked for a moment and then resumed his speech. The audience went back to sleep.


I hoped they would finish soon,


this casket was getting stuffy.