Week 22, Title: Better by far you should forget and smile

A four-foot box, a foot for every year
- Seamus Heaney

Juanita screams. It’s not a cry. It’s a feral, angry thing. A mother lion reaching out to tear her too-young child from death’s maw.

*

Andy, almost catatonic, paws ineffectually at his clothes. Juanita, already dressed, pins the last strand of hair into place and then helps her partner out of his pyjamas and into his funeral suit.

Some family members comment on the horribly ironic sunshine of the day. She doesn’t think much of it.

Some friends mention Heaven. She doesn’t think much of that either.

Andy’s fingers are clasped onto hers, desperate. She finds it cloying. She can’t give him what he needs. She doesn’t have the strength.

Juanita stands up and says words and forces inflection into them. Forces the feeling her daughter, Marie, deserves. She feels empty.

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