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Dead, Not Buried

by Guy A. Duperreault ~1367 Words

Sarah hurried up the stairs. It had been more than ten years since she'd seen them, and tonight they

were, as she had remembered them, covered by a bit more snow and ice than safety ostensibly

demanded. The fear driving her kept her automatic critic from expressing itself with anything more than

an internally harrumphed Typical!, even as her expensively clad feet placed themselves with the careful

ease of her now forgotten youthful familiarity.

The sound of the voices coming from the house had compounded the fear she'd felt since the moment

she'd received via her message machine notice that her estranged father had died. It wasn't a huge

surprise. He was old, very old, but his death had come before she'd been able to forgive him enough to

tell him how much she'd missed him.

The exaggerated carelessness in the laughter and excited voices she heard through the windows, wall,

door told her that they were well into their cups. Typical!, was all she had time to think before her hand agrasped the door knob and twisted it.

There was no change in the now clearly ear-thumping din of monologues competing with conversations,

despite her bringing into the much too warm living room a blast of the cold outsider air. Sarah stood for a

moment to catch her breath through the cacophony of fuggy aromas and beer. Then she slammed the

door hard enough to rattle the glass and achieve from the gaggle a pause.

Several heads turned for a moment enough to dismiss Sarah before resuming their ostentatiously self-

important yapping. But several other sets of eyes fixated on Sarah. Lips pursed and jaws tightened as

breath shortened. These were her family: two sisters, two brothers an aunt by marriage and three

uncles.

No one moved.

To break the impasse Sarah shrugged with an exaggeration meant to affirm her right to be there and her

right to question them. After a quick communal exchange of glances her family moved towards her as

one.

'Okay,' she said when they got close enough to hear her, 'where is he?'

There was silence. Sarah expected them to look guilty and sheepish, but instead they simply stood tall.And quiet. That disconcerted her a little. Uncle Bob was over six feet seven, and his standing tall was

indeed intimidating, even if he was a thin as a bean pole.

'Well?!' she continued, pretending that her fears were not going to be realized, 'where is he?

'Sarah, how would you like us to answer that?' Uncle Bob evaded.

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'With the truth, dammit! I'm his daughter. I deserve to know the truth.' Sarah heard her voice quavering a

little, which made her angry. She looked past Bob to his wife, Abigail. Sarah began to say 'Please,' but

the thought of begging with these repulsive cult members cut it off.

'Where is he!?' she yelled loudly enough to silence the rest of the people in the room, who turned to look

at the gathered family.

'Sarah,' Auntie Em said with the condescending smugness of a below average teacher who considers

herself to be great with kids, 'there is no need to yell, dearie. He can hear you. He is everywhere.' Em

moved her arms out in a bad imitation of a child's production of Swan Lake while turning around to

gesticulate the pleroma, even if limited to this small house in a dark wood far from neighbours. Sarah

thought that she heard Em hum something, but it was too faint to make that out for sure.

The other family members smiled and, as if on cue, joined her with the arms and the slow swan-ish spin-

o-rama. And then, also as if on cue, the rest of the people joined them. Now Sarah could very clearly

hear them humming. It sounded like gggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooookkkkkkkkkk,' repeated with adroning not unlike a slightly out of tune hurdy gurdy playing a tough crowd in a redneck bar.

'Shit you guys,' Sarah snapped. But the drone only got louder. She had seen this before had been

forced to join them when she was a child. She had never felt comfortable with grokking when she was a

young and now, here, an outsider in her own family, she had become indeed a stranger in a strange

land. This repulsed her.

Sarah hurried into the living room, hoping to see the coffin. But none was there, so she moved through

with a touch of panic to the den. Still nothing. Without even a shred of hope, but with the stubbornness of

a denial born of survival she moved through the rest of the rooms. Before moving to the bathroom, as the

last place, she went to the kitchen. It was filled to overflowing with the signs of food preparation and

cooking.

There was no possibility of denial, now. She turned, re-entered the living room, moved past the crowd of

contentedly grokking 'family' of kith and kin. She slouched into the main bathroom, with its oversized

soaker tub. The faint odour, almost of boiled pork and cabbage, tickled familiarly her olfactory nerves

and she became instantly a girl of eleven all those years ago. That girl was also walking into this

bathroom with its odd smell. Beside the tub was a long and narrow cushion with the marks of knees

clearly impressed into it. Her older sister was moving away from the tub with a face dead with shock and

grief. Her face was wet, as was the bangs of her hair. That young Sarah looked at the tub, looked at her

sister, looked at the cushion and had screamed 'NOOOOOOO!' for as long and as loudly as she could.She ran forward to the tub, and quickly looked over into it to see it filled with what looked like a thin stew.

She cried "Nooooooo,' again, this time less loudly.

'Sarah,' she heard someone say soothingly. 'This is as it should be. It is for the best, in the end.' It was

probably Auntie Em, she remembered thinking at the time, because of the sucky schoolmarm way the

disembodied voice droned.'Once you have drunk the essence of her, you will experience the return to

grace you mother's death has provided us with.'

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Today, Sarah like the younger one, walked to the edge of the tub. There was again the thin stew-like

liquid, although there was just the dregs pooled around the the plugged drain. She lowered her knees

onto the stained cushion, and with her eyes fixed on the liquid, began to cry.

'I'm sorry,' she sniffled after a time. 'I am so sorry.'

'For what?' her eldest sister, Hannah, snapped condescendingly. 'For leaving us? For your contempt?

For your disregard for the truth of Life and the true means of celebrating Life in Death?'

Sarah said nothing. She'd fought that fight many years ago, many, many times with Hannah, and wasn't

going to fight it again. She put her hands on the edge of the tub, and pushed herself wearily to her feet.

She hadn't slept for as long as she could think, and it had caught up with her.

'Good bye, Hannah,' she said, as she pushed herself past her.

'Damn you, Sarah!' Hannah cursed, 'Why can't you understand that this way he lives us, through us?

And that he has joined his wife?'

With that Sarah stopped and turned. 'Damn you, Hannah! You and the rest of these freaks. Since when

do civilized and intelligent people take as a bible the sensationalistic writings of a hack science fiction

writer?!' Even as she said that she recognized that her argument wasn't worth the taste of salt from a well

used cow lick. People had from time immemorial sacrificed all things to anything for the words of the

dead and forgotten.

Hannah said nothing. She crossed her arms while behind her the droning continued. Sarah remember

that with her mother the droning had gone on for hours.

'Good bye,' she said again. She turned and left the house. 'Good bye.'