Quiet Death

[dori_bell]

The blonde girl sat on the top step outside the Guardian Angel cathedral. She wore mourning blue, dark and conservative: a pleated skirt, a clean blouse with a tailored jacket buttoned too high, a wide-brimmed hat. She had pinned a wilted mum to her lapel. She tilted her face to the church with its stained glass windows illuminated from within. A night service carried on. She heard singing, an organ. It was a place of grief strangely juxtaposed against a celebratory city. On the high stone steps, people often remarked about the general lack of respect shown by tourists as they motored past the sanctuary. Dori smoked a cigarette and watched traffic crawl by. Her knees were pressed together but there was a view up her skirt if you got the right angle. White panties worn with no hose. Someone honked. Her gaze darted and flickered like a bird’s, but she didn’t adjust her ankles.

Sometimes she came to these things. People asked her how she knew so-and-such and vague answers sufficed. Dori knew them from the neighborhood, from school, from volunteering at the hospital… she could pick up all sorts of life details from an obit. She looked nonthreatening and half the time, people tuned out her answers because they had only asked to be polite, to show some semblance of proper decorum.

It was warm tonight. She considered peeling off her jacket and blouse and sitting there in a thin undershirt, where she would be mistaken for a half-dressed drunk. Someone would offer to walk her home, and maybe they’d be decent and do so, or maybe they’d steer her into a gritty corner to take advantage. Once she had taken a life that way… let him feel her up, exclaim over her innocence, and then –

Pffft

– she crumpled her fist and his life sifted away like dirt through her fingers. Quietly.

Dori scraped her shoe against the concrete and listened to the music from a car's open windows.

[Thread: Open to Anyone]

Comments

[dori_bell]

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Graveside services were much more intimate and an unfamiliar face such as hers was bound to be noticed. She watched him stamp out the smoke.

“It’s strange, don’t you think?” Dori asked solemnly. “To stay and watch the body being lowered into the earth?” She had seen plenty of funerals and how they tore at people, how that final image of a disappearing coffin made fathers shake in their folding chairs and mothers claw at the dirt, as if angry that the ground had stolen a person from them. “I prefer ashes. It’s more natural than embalming fluids, boxes and buckles and satin. No one likes holes anyway.”

[v_harkryder]

He gave her a bit of a look, but he still couldn't place that Something that was bothering him about her. Then he shook it off. Maybe it was just her way of behaving at funerals. They affected everyone differently.

"I'll probably just stop by for a minute myself," he said a little absently. He was slapping his pockets, looking for his keys. "There's gonna be a thing at the house afterwards, but that's for family and close friends. I won't be there."

Virgil found his key ring, re-buttoned his jacket. The dull metal glinted against his broad brown palm. "I'm sorry for your loss," he told the blonde. "Dean was a good guy."

[dori_bell]

“Thank you.” She had given him the creeps. Dori wasn’t the best with social cues but she had seen that look a few times. A small smile, which might have passed for gratitude, softened the severity of her face. No matter how long this human life lasted, she wouldn’t blend the way that James could; she was anathema and people couldn’t explain why, even if they felt terrible for thinking so.

“I said what I did because he’s not there,” she said with a light shrug. “In the ground, in the wind,” her fingers flitted, “The body is only a vessel, and his is empty now. He’ll be somewhere else.”

[v_harkryder]

"The body might pass on, but the spirit lingers."

It was roughly the same thing he'd been thinking, and he was remembering his first few visits to the Stateside V.A. hospitals to see fellow soldiers who'd been wounded in country. Men without limbs, those who'd been blinded or disfigured, and the ones who didn't come home at all. Once the fragile vessel was damaged, the only thing holding it together was the spirit within.

Virgil looked up at the night sky, tried to pick out the stars beyond the clouds. "You take care now," he said to the blonde, and his hard-soled shoes made noise on the stairs as he descended to the sidewalk. He might not go to the burial after all. He'd paid his respects, and there'd been enough death for one day.