How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
the day of the funeral (5 years before today)
With unusual focus, Jolie Quisling prepared herself for the funeral. Up to that point, her day had been quiet. There were no tears or blank stares – in fact, very little drama at all. After showering, she simply opened her closet and looked over the slim selection of black. There wasn't much to see. Just a few black skirts and two black dresses. She held up each of the pitiful alternatives and stared carefully at herself in the mirror. Even before she started this ritual, she knew that the choices would be wrong. As cute as the skirts were, they were off limits because Jolie understood that a dress was required for an occasion of this sort. And that was the problem. The most fetching of the black dresses had been worn a few weeks earlier and the other to Mr. Simms' funeral the previous September. Or was it August? She couldn't remember the month. She just remembered that the air that day was terribly hot.
"As hot as today," she thought.
Under each arm of the dress, she could still make out sweat stains that were white and jagged. They looked like sugar and she wondered if (by some miracle) they might taste sweet but knew that they wouldn't. Regardless, it was obvious that neither dress was what she wanted. Not because either was inappropriate or even because they were soiled and wrinkled, but because all the same crowd would be there. For this day, Jolie wanted to wear something special.
Frustrated, she pushed the hangers back and forth as if all the traveling from one end of the closet to the other would somehow make the clothes more presentable. The muffled clinking and clacking of hangers annoyed her even more than the clothes themselves. As her anger rose, the hangers moved more quickly. Beige stripes and off-white checks smashed against the truly inappropriate – the greens and yellows. But that was what she really wanted to wear. Something bright. Something unexpected. Something everyone would remember. In one final furious movement, she shoved all the clothes to one side of the closet and slammed the door.
"Why do funerals have to be so..."
Before the end of that sentence, her words slowed to a distracted trickle because a flash of color caught her eye from under the bed. The object (whatever it was) was partially hidden by a crumpled blanket and it gave Jolie a brief instant of hope. She thought it might be a pin or some other piece of jewelry that could brighten her drab choices.
Dressed only in a slip, she got on the floor and wriggled beneath the bed frame. As she moved, the seams between the hardwood slats left traces on her knobby knees – red indentations that were so deep they'd last well into the eulogy. As she strained to cross the last inch between her fingers and the flash of color, she heard her mother's voice.
"Mary Arroyo, are you wearing the slip I put out for you?" There was a pause, a tapping foot, and then, "You need to wear a slip, dear."
Jolie grunted a response. Her mother interpreted the grunting sound as "Yes" but actually it was closer to "Leave me alone." In a way, it didn't matter because Jolie got to express annoyance at the same time that her mother got to believe that her daughter was being compliant. In the silence that followed, they both nodded – happy that they had been understood.
