Pieces Part 1

The Funeral

I dreamed every night for years, and out of all of them... Why did this one end up coming true? Why couldn't I write this part out?

Why do I gotta go through this!

I didn't know if I should just...let my tongue bleed for speaking it or cut my head off for dreaming it...

This person has always been the closest to me while they were alive, but now the furthest person as I watch them go six feet under from behind a tree.

Why God, gods, goddesses—whatever Higher Power there was in the world! Why me?

Whichever one of y'all wrote this script, you win! You genuinely are cruel.

I clenched my trembling fists. Everything before me was hazy—the sprawling, wrought-iron fences that palisaded the cemetery, the ash gravestone at my feet.

Everything is so grey.

My heart felt like it was tangled in a barbed knot. I wished this could be a dream, as the script I'd been handed was too horrible to fathom. The years inscribed on the mineral block—they couldn't be real. Nothing that met my eyes wasn't a forge of reality because if any of it were real...I didn't know how I'd move forward from this.

I don't know how I'm supposed to live.

Even with the tears that pooled in the corner of my eyes, I realized that today wasn't a 'first.' I'd been churned through this terror once before. This sort of malaise may have been written in my fate.

I gulped down a jolt of sobs. There was no escaping the truth anymore. I was accountable to two pressing truths—one, this was Tina's funeral. Two, my nightmares were manifesting in the real world.

The truth had been so obvious I shouldn't have been shaken by it. But my body jerked into more violent tears, and soon, I could barely read the memorial in front of me.

A soft voice piped up at my side. "Hey, Moe—doesn't that guy look familiar?"

I wiped my eyes and glanced to my side. With her flaming red mane, Amber pointed off to one of the roads that wound around the cemetery.

"It's the guy that you ran into that night. I wonder why he is here." A man clad in a trench jacket and flat cap was striding toward a black vehicle. Its windows were harshly tinted.

I squinted at his figure. While I couldn't claim to know every face that made up Tina's circle, this guy seemed eerily out of place. And I knew this area well enough to know that he was not dressed to local sensibilities.

My eyes flitted down to his shoes.

And that was when a glaring memory affronted my conscience.

"Those are the same shoes from that night," I muttered. The man kept a steady, sharp stride to the car, a familiar scar engraved on his palm.

He was here on business. But what was so urgent that'd summon him to a graveyard?

Once he got to the passenger's door of the car, the man glanced up in my direction. He flashed a smile.

I couldn't speak or react. The man squeezed into the car without any other form of acknowledgment.

"I-I don't know who he is! But we need to find out! He's getting into his car; let's go!" I shrieked. Whoever that stranger was, he'd crossed my radar far too oddly to be stumbling upon this road by mere 'coincidence.' He knew something, and I would figure out what it was.

No matter what it takes.

As I started walking to confront him, a firm voice said, "Young man, I don't think that's a good idea."