# The Trouble with Empty Funerals - 3,300~ (Language)



## OLDSOUL (Sep 20, 2013)

Forgot to include a language warning in the title, so here it is.



Rain pisses down as Chimes recites _You are Always With Us _at the empty funeral of Francis Grundy. 
It’s the first empty funeral Chimes has read at in the two years he’s been a funeral poet.     Every other funeral had a least a few people turn up. Even the homeless fella they buried a few months prior had a small crowd of mangy drunks to send him off. 
It seems all of Mr Grundy’s friends are either buried in their ponchos in two feet of dirt in Vietnam, or in nursing homes trying to remember if they have any grandchildren.


_You Are Always With Us_ holds more irony than it did at more populated funerals:
_…And you will remain, hereafter;_
_The name on the tips of our tongue._
_And though for you, this chapter is over and done,_
_Rest easy, your journey has only just begun._
With a wet slap, Chimes closes the journal and hangs his head obligatorily. Rain hits his nape and runs down his spine.
He fixes his vacant gaze upon the dark smear on the corner of the coffin where one of the pallbearer's had slipped over in the wet. He stands now with a smear of mud up his leg, shivering slightly, his hands behind his back as if told by his mother not to touch anything else.
Before the service Bill, the preacher, had mentioned that Mr Grundy’s wife had walked out just a few minutes before the police found Mr Grundy splayed out on the Manhattan sidewalk in his slippers, two storeys down from his apartment. He’d landed just right on neck and his spine pierced his brain and that was the end of Mr Grundy. 
Ten points for a perfect swan dive.
Chimes eyed the funeral portrait sitting beside the headstone. The old man had a pallidness about him that seemed inhuman, even when he was alive. His face looked like a t-shirt stretched in a scuffle, the bags under his eyes were tricky putty smeared down toward his cheeks. His eyes were fogged with cataracts and had that glazed, thousand yard stare about him, too. Spillover from his service in Vietnam, Chimes figured.
Chimes struggles to think of a worse way to die than alone and full of regret, with your brain a shish kebab. A shiver runs down his spine at the thought of it. He makes a note to himself to pick up flowers for his wife on his way home.
Bill throws a white rose that hits the top of the coffin and slides down into the water collecting at the bottom of the grave. He mumbles one last vague sentiment to his feet as Chimes turns the collar of his peacoat up. He nods to the preacher and the pallbearers and turns away.
“Chimes, would you mind helping us lower in the coffin?” Bill asks, and Chimes thinks about pretending he hadn’t heard him. “It looks like our other guy isn’t going to show up for work. We could really use the help.”
Chimes turns back, his socks squelch and the clay is slick underfoot.
Clay ground is good for exactly nothing other than building cemeteries on.
"Thank you, son,” says Bill, looking at Chimes with weak and pleading eyes. "So good of you to do.”
Not standing right while lowering a coffin can either send you sprawling onto the thing or leave you with a slipped disc. If you’d rather avoid unnecessary medical bills, and widows swinging handbags, you’d best keep your back straight and your weight on your back foot. 
"Lift," says Bill, as soon as Chimes finds sturdy enough footing on the wet clay. With practiced precision, they lift the coffin up. Bill removes the bars from underneath the coffin and they begin lowering it in. Hand over hand.
The coffin makes a soft splash as Mr Grundy lands down into muddy eternity. 
Rook cemetery is the only cemetery within fifty miles that doesn’t bury people in mass graves to cut costs. Some funerals even sell the flowers back to florists to be recut and resold. The flowers on your wife’s desks the next morning after you get thrown in a hole could well be the same flowers used in your funeral procession.
The pallbearer's pick up their shovels and become the gravediggers and Chimes turns on his heel and leaves without a word.
“Chimes,” says Bill. "Wait a moment would you?"
The small, balding man shuffles up to him, treading carefully so as not to slip, and lifts the umbrella up to cover Chimes's head and right shoulder as they walk.
“You got that bible yet?” He asks.
“Can’t say I have, Bill.”
“You know full well I’m not selling you anything.”
“I know.”
“Then pick one up on your way home?” he says and pulls Chimes’s right hand out of his pocket. He slaps a piece of paper in it. “These are the verses. Read them. Before bed.”
Chimes says nothing. Just blows smoke and eyes the preacher off.
“Just do it. And get a crucifix for the mantel or something.” 
A soft hand comes down on Chimes’s shoulder and he sees the preachers eyes are sunken back into his skull, staring up at him like frightened animals from their burrows. 
“Alright Bill. I’ll do it.”
“Alright. Good. See you later.” 
He falls back. Chimes walks on, his shoulders hugging his neck.
Rain pisses down.
———
After burying Mr Grundy, Chimes had found himself struck with a strange craving for Irish Whisky. It was birthed in his mind as he left the cemetery and he figured he’d pick some up on the way home as a tribute to old Mr Grundy.
The fight he had with his wife that morning crosses his mind as he pines the shelves at the liquor store near to his apartment. He’d watched as her eyes stare upward as if asking God to grant her the strength not to throttle him. Flowers and take away food; the universal peace offering. He remembers the flower shop closed down two months back.
He turns the Bill’s advice over in his head as he walks back to his apartment past Diago’s Reject Store. He wonders about plastic crucifixes and if they’d ever work as well as the wooden ones, or if they’d even work at all. He wonders where he’d get a bible this late. 
He doesn’t wonder enough.
As he picks that bottle of pricey Irish Whisky off the shelf he wonders where he’s heard of it. He chalks it down to the subliminal power of advertising and walks out of the store. 
A bum approaches him. Grimy palm cupped. Eyes pleading. Clothes pissed in. 
“Hey man, you got a lighter?”
Chimes puts a cigarette on his lips and lights it. He hands the bum his lighter.
“Hey thanks. Oh man, a pink lighter. I like the colour pink. That’s the colour I am right now.” His teeth are tilted like a row of fallen yellow dominos. 
“You don’t say,” Chimes says, and he bounces on his heels in the cold. He can see the pizza shop from there.  Chimes is a magnet for charity cases.
“Yeah man,” the bum says, producing a green lighter from his pocket. “Green is the colour I am when I’m around my friends. Green is a good colour too. But man, you don’t want to be black. Black is no good colour to be, man.”
Chimes just stares with wide eyes. Wondering if the guy is going to light a cigarette or he’s just hoarding lighters for the apocalypse. The pizza shop is two doors down.
“You’ve got a blackness about you, man,” he says, a string of saliva stretches between his lips as he talks. “For real. You’ve got something on your shoulders. You’ve got something weighing down on you, man. Black is no good colour to be.”
Chimes has plenty of lighters in a drawer at home. He casts two shadows on the shopfronts as he hurries away.
———
Chimes stumbles into his apartment drunk and bearing room temperature pizza. He’d polished off a third of the bottle of whisky before he’d reached the elevator. He’s surprised how easy it went down and how well he held it. 
He finds Sara reading on the couch in the sitting room. Jack London. Her eyes pour hungrily over the pages, drinking from them greedily. Chimes never made her eyes light up like that.
“I hope you haven’t eaten,” he says, beaming a drunken smile that shows nicotine stains on his teeth. “I bought pizza.” 
He hopes to dear God their fight that morning has blown over. He’s very sorry about being a prick. He just has to find the right words to win her affections again. He’s never been good with words.
“I’ve eaten already,” she says. Her bluntness cuts him like a knife. She sure knows how to make him feel like a junky asking for a light.
He sits down in his old armchair and all the words he has for her all of a sudden catch in his throat like bottlenecked Manhattan traffic. He lets out a stifled cough and that’s all. 
He thinks back to the first time he met Sara. She had her hair done up in such a way. Lips red and ripe to eat. She was a librarian. Glasses hanging over the bridge of her nose. That sultry walk had set a fire in Chimes that was still burning to this day.
He remembers she was an infirmary nurse that had treated his shrapnel burns in Germany during the second World War. She had such a smile. A smile the war didn’t touch, and when she smiled for him, it was as good as morphine. Her eyes were blue and they sparkled like sun on the sea. But as bright as they were, they had faded for him. 
Chimes shakes his head and looks at Sara. Her eyes are brown. Dry leaves in the park brown. Hazelnut brown. Not blue.
He rubs his forehead and puts a cigarette on his lips with shaking hands. Sara’s head turns so fast her neck cracks. 
“Have you gone bat-shit crazy? You can’t smoke in here.”
Chimes remembers himself and puts the cigarette away. She was right. They would be booted out of their apartment for triggering the smoke alarm. Not to mention the fine. What was he thinking?
“What has gotten into you tonight? You come home drunk and now you’re smoking inside.” 
Her eyes stare through him. Vacant and dim, like neon lights shut off after closing.
He feels her slipping inexorably away from him. He feels a distance that’s always been there, but that he’s only now paying mind. He wants to pull her close, but he knows he can’t. He knows her bags are all but packed. But they met so long ago. Right on the cusp of the Great Depression. He knows that when the lights are off and he heard the goldfish _pop _of her lips touching its her uttering that damn airforce captains name, still. After all the years since the war. All his presence had done was keep her from her true love. That’s all he’d ever been.
But Chimes doesn’t know anyone in the airforce. 
He shakes his head again and Sara is still staring at him. He has the cigarette dangling off his lips idly. 
“Nothing,” Chimes says, after a long moment. How long had he been staring off? “Nothing’s gotten into me. I’m just tired. Big day.” He puts the cigarette back in the packet and attempts to clear the tension, “Did you know they spray bug spray into the nostrils of dead bodies so no bugs crawl out during viewings?”
“That’s charming,” Sara says, and she’s back in her book. The cover says _The Call of the Wild _in big letters.
Chimes isn’t wild. Maybe that’s it. Sara likes wild and rough and spontaneous. Chimes always said spontaneity is what landed girlfriends with black eyes and in the bottom of ditches. But really he understands. She wants her heart to beat in her chest for her man. That’s her thing. And he’s never been one to take risks. He’s a homebody. He has about as much give in him as a piece of cured leather. Not like that airforce captain, Joe or John. Gail deserved more than he could give her. 
Sara.
Gail.
“Stop!” Chimes yells, clutching his head in his hands. Sara jumps and almost loses her page. 
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her brow all bunched up like underwear in a washing basket. 
He pulls out the bottle of Irish Whisky and takes a swig. He’s all but hyperventilating.
“I think I had a bad dream,” says Chimes and he stands up.
“Since when do you carry a bottle of whisky around with you?”
Chimes gets up to fix himself some coffee. He thinks maybe he’s overtired. He hopes.
———
The percolator boils on the stovetop and Chimes stares out over the sprawling city through the window. Thousands of fireflies in grids sitting on black. Flickering on. Flickering off. A billboard advertising viagra is illuminated by floodlights all night long.
His bones ache. His heart is thumping laxly, encased in fat. He can feel every aching bone. Knees. Thumbs. Index finger, middle joint. Ankles. Back. Neck. Everything is volatile and upset. Old. Leathered. A jalopy of a man. Beat up. 
Beat down.
He’s trying not to think. He busies himself in the bubbling of the percolator. In the sound of his feet against the sticky linoleum. The dripping of the tap. Clanging off the pipes. The scratching under the floorboards. His breath rising from his lips in his heated apartment. 
Should’ve taken that preachers advice— 
No. He’s in the moment. Mindful of his surroundings. Anything that perforates your mind, you breath it out with your next exhale. In the _here and now,_ with the sounds of the moment.
Breath in.
Breath out.
An old banana sitting in the trash catches his eye.
———
He storms out into the lounge. It takes the thudding floorboards to even get Sara to look up out of her world at him, “since when do we throw out perfectly good food?”
“What’re you talking about? It’s rotting.”
“Gail, I’m sick of having this conversation—”
Sara’s mouth falls open incredulously. 
“What the _fuck _did you just call me?”
She slams her book down on the arm of the chair and there is the flaming gaze that Chimes asked for. There’s that roiling passion of a woman full of life. She stands up slowly.
“What?,” Chimes asks. “What did I say?”
“Oh, it all makes sense now,” she says, looking up past the ceiling, as if God himself was explaining something to her. “The drinking, the hyperventilating, the anxious wayward stares. I hope she was fucking worth it, Brent you cunt.”
She storms off past Chimes to their bedroom.
Chimes just stands in the kitchen holding a mouldy banana. 
A short time later, Sara comes bustling out with a suitcase full of clothes. She dials a number —speed dial— and puts the phone to her ear and opens the front door without a backward glance. The muffled voice of a man answers.
The door slams so hard the windows rattle in their frames.
———
Chimes stares into his bathroom mirror with wide eyes, thinking about how he knows so much about how Japanese soldiers could run sixteen miles on a ball of rice and that they bloat up like balloons when they die. 
The mindfulness thing had gone to shit.
He thinks on why he is filled with sorrow. A lifetime of regret. More years of regret then he’s been alive. Cumbersome, distracting regret. The kind of regret that paints everything black. 
His heart beats tiresomely, as if it’s the last splutters of a stalling car.
His eyes are piss holes in the dirt. He never knew or appreciated eyes with life behind them, until he saw how dead eyes looked. Dead and gone. The glazed eyes of a cadaver staring back at him. No good to anyone. The blackness washes all over him. 
You can’t drown your sorrows, you can only drown in them. 
He takes another swig of whisky anyway.
He pulls his face back with his hands like she used to, revealing the remnants of the vaguely handsome man buried there amongst the beaten old leather of his skin. The lines on his face are the dried river beds of mars. He takes in the puffy bags under his eyes, like tricky putty smeared down toward his cheeks. His face like a t-shirt stretched in a fight. 
He can’t shake this feeling for anything. It has sunk over him like an invisible veil and is as much apart of him now as anything ever was. It runs deep inside him like cold new donor blood running through his veins. As cold and empty as the apartment.
Ever since the war, he felt unable to live a normal life. He was prone to angry outbursts and even so many years after the war, the clanging of the pipes when the toilet flushed still set the hair on his neck on end. To him, they still sound like a machine gun being loaded in a skirmish. Backfiring cars would stop his heart in his chest for a moment. And he found the only lady who would put up with all that. She stuck by him, but he swindled his chances. He used them all up. He drank her dry, and now she’s gone. Out the door, never to be seen again.
He pulls out the bottle of Irish Whisky and takes a few deep gulps. The bathroom window rattles in its frame.
The realisation that Gail is gone suddenly dawns on him. She has packed her bags and gone off to be with some long lost lover that’s been burning in her heart all these years.
He can now hear the ticking of the kitchen clock. The light seems so much colder and less welcoming. The sitting room seems too big. 
All of those things that Gail had filled with her presence now seemed incomplete. The groove in the couch where she sat. 
He already missed her. All the hours in a day now seemed impossible to face. The neural pathways in his brain wired to Gail and Gail alone. 
There’s a salty tear filling the dry river beds of his cheeks. 
A few of the spindly silver hairs on his head sway, like a spider that’s found itself on its back; there’s a breeze trailing into the bathroom from the open sitting room window. Motes of dust swirl in the ersatz light of the lamp. Dirty air from the street pours in as he moves across the sticky linoleum and onto the carpet of the sitting room.
It’s blood with a stone from him; he’s no good to anyone. 
The mechanical whir of the city fills his ears. Directly below is the clink of a business man’s foreign coin into the lowly beggar’s cup. 
“Thanks,” he says, for the illusion of charity. 
Somewhere in the cacophony of grey city white noise, among the festering hurts affixed with obligation and debt, there are the footsteps of his lover, cutting her loses. Doing what everyone else lives in fear of doing. His heart swells for her.
And with the first smile he’s meant in the longest time, he looks to the blanket of smoke man has laid before the heavens. Through it the faintest glimmer of a satellite shines. No stars. 
Mr Grundy sighs his last breath and hopes two storeys will be enough if he lands just right.


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## Alabastrine (Sep 20, 2013)

OLDSOUL said:


> Forgot to include a language warning in the title, so here it is.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I was enchanted by this. I don't normally read such a long post but I found the way you described each scene to be enthralling. I couldn't take my eyes off of it and I wish there was more. Besides a few spelling errors, and some grammar...this is well done in my opinion. I had a hard time though figuring out their ages and the time period, but that is just me being picky.


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## OLDSOUL (Sep 20, 2013)

Alabastrine said:


> I was enchanted by this. I don't normally read such a long post but I found the way you described each scene to be enthralling. I couldn't take my eyes off of it and I wish there was more. Besides a few spelling errors, and some grammar...this is well done in my opinion. I had a hard time though figuring out their ages and the time period, but that is just me being picky.



Thanks for taking the time. I'm glad it kept your attention the way through.

Of what you've said, I think the most valuable tidbit I'll take is the age/time frame dilemma. Chimes lives in the modern day. Grundy is older and has experienced a war and this is why Chimes has those extra memories of things he never experienced. I should make all of that a tad more clear. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.


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## Alabastrine (Sep 20, 2013)

OLDSOUL said:


> Thanks for taking the time. I'm glad it kept your attention the way through.
> 
> Of what you've said, I think the most valuable tidbit I'll take is the age/time frame dilemma. Chimes lives in the modern day. Grundy is older and has experienced a war and this is why Chimes has those extra memories of things he never experienced. I should make all of that a tad more clear. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.



See, I completely missed that, not necessarily because of you though. I thought maybe he was suffering from a bit of Alzheimer's and was remembering his first love and Grundy was a friend that he buried.


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## OLDSOUL (Sep 20, 2013)

Alabastrine said:


> See, I completely missed that, not necessarily because of you though. I thought maybe he was suffering from a bit of Alzheimer's and was remembering his first love and Grundy was a friend that he buried.



Shows I need to make it a fair bit clearer!


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## altraseckz (Sep 24, 2013)

_You Are Always With Us_ holds more irony than it *does* at more populated funerals:
((You switch from present to past tense.)) 

Before the service Bill, the preacher, *had *mentioned that Mr Grundy’s wife had walked out just a few minutes before the police found Mr Grundy splayed out on the Manhattan sidewalk in his slippers, two *storeys* down from his apartment. He’d landed just right on *his* neck and his spine pierced his brain and that was the end of Mr Grundy. 
((Had is unnecessary. Since he mention*ed *it we know it had happened. I think its supposed to be spelled stories, but I'm not certain. Added _his. _))

Ten points for a perfect swan dive.
((Witty, but it feels cliche. I like the idea of the comment, but I think you could include a more impaction set of words.))


Rook cemetery is the only cemetery within fifty miles that doesn’t bury people in mass graves to cut costs. Some funerals even sell the flowers back to florists to be recut and resold. The flowers on your wife’s desks the next morning after you get thrown in a hole could well be the same flowers used in your funeral procession.
((I like this image. I'm driven to read further to maybe find out why mass graves are a thing in this story.))


Rain pisses down.
((Good god. How powerful, the repetition of this line.))

———
After burying Mr Grundy, Chimes *had* found himself struck with a strange craving for Irish Whisky. 
(Had is unnecessary and disagrees with the prior tense))

He turns *the Bill’s *advice over in his head as he walks back to his apartment past Diago’s Reject Store. He wonders about plastic crucifixes and if they’d ever work as well as the wooden ones, or if they’d even work at all. He wonders where he’d get a bible this late. 
((The Bill?))
He doesn’t wonder enough.
*As* he picks that bottle of pricey Irish Whisky off the shelf he wonders where he’s heard of it. He chalks it down to the subliminal power of advertising and walks out of the store. 
((As is unnecessary. I'd also like a specific price. What exactly is pricey, a name or description of the bottle wouldn't hurt either. He's considering it so hard, a little specifics would make sense.))

“Hey thanks. Oh man, a pink lighter. I like the colour pink. That’s the colour I am right now.” His teeth are tilted like a row of fallen yellow *dominoes. *
((Fixed for spelling.))

Wondering if the guy is going to light a cigarette or *if(?) *he’s just hoarding lighters for the apocalypse. 


*He’d* polished off a third of the bottle of *whiskey*(sp) before *he’d* reached the elevator.
((He'd should be he.))

He’s surprised how easy it went down and how well he held it. 
((Did he hold it? Or is he still holding it?))

Chimes never made her eyes light up like that.
((Suggestion: Chimes doesn't make her eyes light up like that.))

“I hope you haven’t eaten,” he says, beaming a drunken smile that shows nicotine stains on his teeth. “I bought pizza.” 
((What if it was just a nicotine stained smile?))


He pulls out the bottle of Irish Whiskey (sp) and takes a swig. He’s all but hyperventilating.“I think I had a bad dream,” says Chimes and he stands up.
“Since when do you carry a bottle of whiskey (sp) around with you?”


He takes another swig of whiskey (Sp) anyway.


He pulls out the bottle of Irish Whiskey (sp) and takes a few deep gulps. 

The realization (Sp) that Gail is gone suddenly dawns on him. 






I loved this. I think its a great piece. Powerful, evocative. The characters feel real, and the end is insane. Great work!


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## dakota.potts (Oct 2, 2013)

Very nice piece. Felt a couple hints of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly with the "Swan dive" line. 

Heartwrenching and realistic. 

The ending left me a good bit confused. Who was Grundy and Chimes? Chimes seemed young, yet there are talks of a World War and a depression. Then it's mentioned that Mr. Grundy's friends may be buried in Vietnam, presumably because of that war. However, it's mentioned that they may also be in a nursing home, meaning they would be very old and it would have to at least be modern time. That would imply 3 generations. 

I definitely felt the ending as it related to Chimes. Didn't get the Grundy connection. Maybe I missed something in my reading.


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## OLDSOUL (Oct 3, 2013)

dakota.potts said:


> Very nice piece. Felt a couple hints of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly with the "Swan dive" line.
> 
> Heartwrenching and realistic.
> 
> ...



The trouble with empty funerals is that spirits that are lonely latch themselves on to any person that shows them generosity. 

Chimes read his poem at Mr Grundy's funeral. Mr Grundy follows Chimes home, after Bill warns Chimes to get a bible (to ward off spirits) and Chimes ignores his warnings. 
Chimes's first experience with Mr Grundy's personality influencing his is when he has a peculiar taste for Irish Whiskey. 
The second time we experience Mr Grundy's personality influencing Chimes is when Chimes finds himself with two sets of memories. He starts to think he's going crazy. After that we see the conflicting personalities fighting and then blurring and ultimately, Mr Grundy ends up possessing Chimes and he carries out his last moments, his wife leaving and him committing suicide, with Chimes's body. If you read it again with that much in mind, I'm sure it'll make sense. Though, not everyone seems to be understanding the story, so I don't know how it'll go being published.


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## dakota.potts (Oct 3, 2013)

A very good writing! I wouldn't necessarily worry about if people understand the story. If it's a clarity issue, then by all means fix it. If it just requires some higher level thinking, though, it may be that people don't get it. 

One thing I would suggest is to add the line you just told me "The trouble with empty funerals is that spirits latch themselves..." to give a little more of a hint for people like me?


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## OLDSOUL (Oct 3, 2013)

dakota.potts said:


> A very good writing! I wouldn't necessarily worry about if people understand the story. If it's a clarity issue, then by all means fix it. If it just requires some higher level thinking, though, it may be that people don't get it.
> 
> One thing I would suggest is to add the line you just told me "The trouble with empty funerals is that spirits latch themselves..." to give a little more of a hint for people like me?



In fact, that's not such a bad idea. It could be thrown in right in the beginning, sort of as a preface. It might clear things up so people enjoy the ride instead of wondering what kind of ride they're on. I was thinking something like;

“Ghosts talking to us all the time — but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

— 
David Foster Wallace


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## bezidentita (Oct 9, 2013)

It's fairly well written, so far.


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