Fairytale?

Chapter 46- Sepulchral Existence

Then, turning to my love, I said,
"The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust."
-

Susan wiped away her tears with the hand that wasn't holding the newspaper.

The article she had been reading wasn't exactly about the train crash- even though there had been many articles about the event that had stolen her whole family. It was a local paper- Finchley Press- and it was about how an entire family save one- her family- had died in the train crash. Some journalist must have noticed it- and decided to write a write-up on the deaths. There were pictures of her siblings there- Lucy in the St. Finbar's uniform, Peter in a lab-coat for some medical exhibition at Cambridge, and a picture of Edmund- and Sanya, even though she was alive- from their wedding portrait. A photograph of her parents on the first Christmas after her father had returned from the war was next to her siblings' photographs.

She couldn't stop looking at them.

"You're still reading the newspaper!" Alberta Scrubb spoke, as she walked into the drawing room, dressed in a black dress and a black hat that was at least two centuries old. "We're going to be late, Susan."

She did not look up from the picture of her family, "No, we aren't, Aunt Alberta."
The funeral was today. It wasn't for two more hours. What did her aunt want to go early for? To stare at the corpses? Had Susan having to identify the dead bodies of her mother, her father, her elder brother, and her younger sister not been enough?
"There're still two hours left."

"Don't talk back." The older woman snapped- but with less dudgeon than there usually would have been. There was no ferocity or haughtiness or anything similar that there usually was- her voice had even become less shrill.
There was no more space for anything but sorrow in her life now.
Her son was dead. Her brother was dead.
But she still had to run the house, and look after her last surviving relative.

At least Harold, her husband, was already at the church- she had sent him over right after breakfast. He was likely having a grand time there, snoozing on one of the back pews.

Good thing she had done it- one less thing to worry about.

"It's an hour and forty-six minutes, not two hours. It'll take you time to get ready, and then twenty minutes to walk there, and it's best for us to be there early. Go get ready, Susan. Now."

Susan didn't sigh or stamp her foot or do a rude hand gesture, all of which she itched to do- she simply put the newspaper down and left the room, not making a single sound.
She felt lifeless. Lifeless beings did not make noise.

Even as she put on the black dress she had bought years ago but had never worn- even as she clasped her mother's pearls around her neck, the ones she had worn on special occasions- even as she accidentally looked over at her sister's side of the room- even as tears started to stream down her face for the twelfth time that day- there was not a peep from her.

The only time she planned on speaking, perhaps ever again, was to deliver the eulogy at the funeral.

That was all.

"Are you ready, then?" Alberta asked, as her niece came down the stairs, her face blank.
The young woman wore bright red lipstick- and her aunt disapproved of that, but at least there was no awful black stuff around her eyes or pink smears on her cheeks. She would take the win- and let Susan have her lipstick, just for the day.