Open Casket

I was walking down a city street one night, and I came across a sign on a pedestal in front of a small storefront funeral home. The sign explained that services for a woman were going to be held there that evening, and it gave her name and the dates of her birth and death, as well as a short paragraph about her life. From some of the details, I started to wonder if this was an old girlfriend of mine. I knew that she had gotten married and she'd had a few kids, and I knew that she had served in the army for a while overseas when she was younger, and all of this was mentioned on the sign. The first name was the same, but it was a common enough name. The last name was different, but I assumed that she had changed it when she had gotten married. I couldn't remember what her husband's last name was. I couldn't be sure if it was really her, but I felt like I needed to know. I needed to know if this had been her life, if she had been happy, if it had all ended here, like this, when she was still fairly young.

There was a large bay window in the front of the funeral home that looked out onto the street. The window was close to the ground, and the curtains were drawn back, leaving the view open to anyone passing by. I crouched down and peered in, and I could see a small, cramped, candlelit room that was recessed into the ground a few feet below street level. The casket was against the far wall and there was a pulpit and three short rows of wooden chairs arranged in front of it. The chairs were all empty. The service hadn't started yet. But there was a large man with a dark beard standing alone in the shadows in the corner of the room with his hands folded at his waist. I figured that this was the husband. I looked at the casket, where most of the soft glow of the room was concentrated. I could only make out the woman's blonde curly hair where her head lay under the open lid.

I looked again over at the husband, and I thought about going in. I wasn't sure what I'd say to him, or how I'd explain who I was. I considered again the possibility that I was wrong, that this was just a complete stranger. But I needed to know. I went down the stone steps to the door of the funeral home. A somber chime played as I opened the door, and inside it was warm and there was a smell of incense and flowers in the air. But when I went over to where I had seen the casket through the window, I found nothing but a table with candles on it. Among the candles there were cards displayed on small stands that had prayers of grief and condolences written on them. What I had taken for blonde hair through the window was apparently only the guttering and flickering flames of the candles. My eyes searched through all the points of lights scattered around the table. I looked over at the husband where he stood watching me from the corner. I shook my head, perplexed. I tried to think of what to ask him, how to ask him. But I didn't know what to say. Finally, I just told him that I was sorry, very sorry, and then I shook his hand and hurried out of the room, back out into the street, back out into the night.

Effigy

It was around twilight, and I was watching from the front window of a dark house, and I saw a sea of flickering lights making its way down the street to the town's square. As they got closer, I saw that it was a mob bearing torches. In the middle of the mob, I could see that they were carrying the faceless figure of a woman made entirely out of paper mache'. The figure was at least twice the size of a real person. They were carrying it over their heads, and they had it lying flat across their hands. The figure bobbed and rolled with their steps, tossing this way and that, with the thick loose locks of red paper hair knocking all about and straying dangerously close to the flame of a few of the torches, and the smooth blank face showing expressionless and undisturbed in the light.

They brought the figure to a place that they had prepared for it at the center of the town's square. There was a wooden beam that stood tall and straight, and it had logs and kindling arranged around its base. They bound the hands and the feet of the figure to this post. They cinched the bonds extra tight with a particularly malicious vigor, and they glanced up at the figure, smirking with their burning eyes dancing, as if they expected to see pain registering on the empty face. The logs and kindling were doused with gasoline, and the mob edged forward in a frenzy, eager to set the blaze going with their torches.

But a man with a megaphone mounted a platform beside the bound figure, and he managed to push the mob back a ways through the sheer volume of his words blasting into their faces. It was too far away for me to make out what he was saying. It was just a general rumbling of thunderous hostility with bursts of angry shouting carrying across the otherwise clear and deserted evening, and it was answered now and then by a roar from the mob and a wild waving of torches in the air and a steady thumping against the ground that I could feel even in the floorboards beneath my feet.

Unable to be restrained any longer, the mob surged forward, everyone pushing everyone else aside and struggling to the front of the crowd, so that it could be their torches that lit the logs and kindling. Instantly the figure was engulfed in flames. I could hear the loud whoosh as the whole thing caught fire. I could see the sudden flare of the light. I could already smell the burning paper. I could almost feel the heat coming off of it. The mob surged back a little from the flames, the light flickering in their eyes. They grew somber and still and they all stood watching the figure burn.

One of the arms of the figure looked like it was about to fall loose at the shoulder as the flames were consuming it. But just as it was about to drop, there was a sudden unfolding of wings, and then a hawk soared up out of the fire. Its wingspan was dark and terrible, and there were flames all around its body. Its eyes smoldered a bright, sinister red, and its talons glowed like hot coals. It swooped up, leaving a trail of smoke and fire behind it, and it circled over the mob, and they all twisted their heads around to follow the path of its flight.

Two more hawks emerged from the figure, just as its other arm and the head were about to come loose. They joined the other hawk in its circling path over the mob. Together the three birds let out a piercing call that ripped through the air. The mob stirred, and I saw them all begin to slowly move in a mass away from the burning figure. One of the hawks seemed to hone in on someone specific in the mob, and it dove straight at him, the other two hawks following closely at its tail. The man tried to push through the crowd and run, but the hawk got a hold of him. Its talons sank into his shoulders with a pop and a hiss of burning flesh.

The hawk dragged the man back to the burning figure, and it dragged him straight into the hottest part of the fire. The dying man cried out in agony, but the hawk's screams were even louder, stranger. It threw itself into the flames right along with the man for the sake of its vengeance. The two were consumed together, but as they burned, three more hawks emerged, just as they had from the paper figure, tearing up into the air and shedding sparks and burning bits of bone and debris over the terrified mob.

The other hawks began grabbing random people from the crowd and dragging them back into the fire, and the hawks multiplied threefold with every victim that they consigned to the flames. The mob had dispersed now, and everyone was running from the scene as fast as they could. Some, when they saw one of the hawks honing in on them, tried to throw the person beside them to the glowing talons. But the hawks stayed on their target, and each person seemed to have a hawk specifically assigned to their fate. A few people almost made it to the edge of the town's square, but the hawks got them all in the end, dragging them one at a time into the fire.

This went on all night with the sky as black as I'd ever seen it beyond the roaring light of the fire and the burning embers carried up and away on the air. The bodies had gathered in a pile in the fire, and I could see people still alive in the there, climbing, struggling, flailing, and finally collapsing and crumbling into ash and cinders indistinguishable from the rest. When the morning came, there was nothing left but smoke and soot and the charred remains of the tall post to which they had bound the paper figure.

Setting the Scene

This friend of mine was working on a novel, but he was having some trouble with it. Someone had looked at one of his earlier drafts and told him that the finished book would come in at about one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pages, which would be ideal for optioning movie rights and adapting into a screenplay. Since then, my friend had gotten it into his head that he was writing a movie rather than a book, and this had come to color and corrupt every scene and line of dialogue. He just couldn't seem to get the project back on track.

So he turned to me for help. We took a look at one of his scenes. We actually saw it play out in front of us like a scene from a movie. The story involved a kidnapping plot, and the scene took place in a parking garage where there was a handoff between the kidnappers and the kidnapped person's family, an exchange of ransom money for the victim. There was a bombastic score thumping against the background of the scene, stinging every dramatic moment. The characters in the scene behaved as though their movements were choreographed to go along with the score. The kidnappers piled out of their sleek black car, wearing sleek black suits, and whipping off their sleek black sunglasses in ice cold slow motion. The kidnapped victim's mother met them dressed in a smart pants suit, with her arms folded, staring them down smugly and complacently.

When the scene was done, I had the set laid out before me like a miniature model of the parking garage. I could approach it and study it. I could reposition and rearrange the players. In a small storage closet in the corner of the parking garage, I saw that there was a tiny reel to reel tape recorder set up on a stool and hooked into the garage's speaker system. This was where the score was coming from. I reached down and clicked it off with the edge of my fingernail. I scratched my chin and peered in close at the tiny figures gathered on the second level of the model. With the music gone, I told my friend that he needed to slow the scene down, pace it out. He needed to think about how something like this would play out in actual life. I told him that that was always a good place to start from. Not because it would make the scene more real, but because it would enable him to find something fresh and visceral in the scene, to locate those four crucial pinpricks that would hold the scene to the wall and keep people looking at it.

My friend crouched down at looked in on the second level. He nodded and twisted his chin as he stood up again, and I reached over and clicked off the switch that worked all of the tiny florescent light fixtures in the model. The shadows deepened around the pedestals of all the little figures. I placed the cardboard cover back over the model, taking care not to bump against the corners of the parking garage and knock any of the figures over or nudge them out of place, and then we left the room and turned out the lights and closed the door behind us.

Part of the Family

I was watching a gangster movie on TV. It opened on a residential street lined with matching bungalows painted in a variety of bright pastels, their yards enclosed with picket fences and landscaped with flower bushes blossoming in colors that complimented the houses. A paper boy flung a paper into one of the yards, and then rode out of frame ringing his bell. All the telltale signs of a nice suburban neighborhood. The movie then cut to an interior shot of a man sleeping in his upstairs bedroom beside his wife, the sounds of birds and the occasional passing car drifting in through the open window.

The man woke up groggy eyed and smacking his lips, and then he jolted awake when he noticed the mob boss standing at the foot of his bed. He went to reach for his glasses on the bedside table, but two of the mob boss's goons grabbed him by the ankles. The wife woke up then and started screaming, and the man was shouting and reaching for her as he got dragged past the foot of the bed. The mob boss and his goons got the man on the floor, and they were kicking at him and spitting at him and yelling. And all the quiet of the morning was shattered in the commotion.

More goons appeared at the window, staring into the room and grinning. The goons in the bedroom hoisted the man up and fed him through the window to the goons outside on the balcony, and they took him out over the railing of the balcony and down into the front yard. All the while, the man and his wife were urgently yelling things at each other, final goodbyes, last minute details of their lives that they needed to relay to one another, since they both knew he wouldn't be coming back. The goons just kept kicking at the man, telling them both to shut their mouths as they carried the man away.

The goons got the man out onto the front walk and even as they carried him off down the street, he was still shouting things back up to his wife where she had poked her head out from the upstairs window. The mob boss came strolling out of the house behind his men with a big satisfied grin on his face. He stopped under a tree in the front yard to light the stub of a cigar that he pulled from his pocket. He looked up and down the street and nodded, as though he were contemplating buying a house in the neighborhood.

A few houses down he noticed an old lady standing on her front walk, clutching her white robe closed at her chest and staring off down the street in the direction that the goons had taken her neighbor. She turned to the mob boss as he strolled over to her, and she lifted a shaking finger at him to ask what was going on. But before she could say anything, he pulled a wad of money from the pocket of his shirt. He laid the money in her bewildered hands, telling her, "Get yourself a new pair of slippers. Alright, sweetheart?" The woman just looked at the money and then down at her bare feet, and then she turned and went back into her house, shaking her head.

The mob boss's son was actually there on the couch next to me, watching the movie along with me. I jolted when I looked over and noticed him there. I told him that he was in the movie too, and I pointed out a scene that he was in. He was just a boy then, and there was a shot of him sitting at a table by himself at a garden party outdoors. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the boy was dressed in his suit that he had worn to church. People were slow dancing on the stone patio and mingling among the rose bushes, and the boy just looked around from person to person, blinking his eyes.

Now that he saw himself in the movie, the mob boss's son perked up and took a renewed interest in it. He even moved closer to the edge of his seat. This was like lost footage of his family's life that had been edited out of his childhood. He never knew about any of this. He saw his father brutally torturing and disfiguring a man, and then he saw him literally come walking into the next room with the kindest smile in the world on his face. And in the son's memory there was only his father walking into that room smiling as the boy had looked up with his birthday hat on just as he was about to blow out the candles on his cake. These missing pieces were an unsettling revelation.

I saw that the movie had piqued the son's interest, and I started to enthusiastically tell him how and why I liked the movie so much. I talked about how it engendered this constant, unnerving feeling that something bad was just about to happen. But I was still just thinking of it all as a movie and evaluating its merits on those grounds alone. He was looking at it differently. He just responded to what I was telling him with a few distracted nods. His whole mind, his ego and his identity, were recalibrating around this new information. The rapid shifting of his eyes and a few sharp twitches of his jaws betrayed all the cogs and wheels that were cranking away inside.

Fan Contract

The first day of class, the teacher had us all sign a paper saying that we waived our right to complain about the fan. The contract was one page, with the terms of the agreement printed in a few brief lines at the top and more than enough lines for all of us to sign underneath. None of us knew exactly what "the fan" was, but we all signed nevertheless. We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to take the class otherwise. Once he had all of our signatures, the teacher taped this paper to the side of a portable box fan, reminding us of our agreement.

He kept the fan on his desk, facing out towards the class. He would turn it at various angles from time to time, so that at one time or another, everyone had the experience of having this fan blowing at them. Needless to say, it was irritating. It would dry out our eyes and blow dust into our faces, and it would blow our pencils and papers off our desks. Sometimes the teacher would carry the fan by the handle, and he would walk around the class with it as he gave his lecture. He would stop to make some point or another, and he would stand there with the fan propped up on the top of someone's desk, blowing directly at them, and he would look around at the class and go on talking, not acknowledging the fan at all, pretending like he didn't notice that he was holding it right in someone's face.

There were two girls who sat right in front of his desk that really got the worst of it. Nearly every class, one of them would finally break and throw her pencil down and ask, "Do you have to have that fan blowing on us all the time? Can you please just turn it off!?" And he would reply, "No, you signed the contract. Anyone else have any questions?" He always said it that way, the sentence already half crumpled up and thrown in the waste basket before immediately moving on to other things. Maybe this was supposed to be a lesson to us to be careful what we signed. Maybe he liked getting on our nerves. Maybe he just really liked his fan. He never did say.