Rain at a Funeral

Audio Recording

Note: I'm not nearly as confident with my Texan accent as I am with my British, so there's a couple parts here where it slips. Forgive me.

This one's about Rick, at Mellissa (his girlfriend) and her family's funeral. A little sadder, even though I've had a great, happy day today.

Rain at a Funeral

Fuckin’ rain.

It shouldn’t even be allowed. My whole life’s just turned into a pathetic fallacy. In multiple senses of the phrase.

It also shouldn’t be allowed to rain at funerals. So movie-typical bull, people in black with their black umbrellas and their sad looks, the rain streaking their cheeks and masking their tears. Except their eyes, their red eyes, they give it away. Rain doesn’t have anything like salt in it to sting like that.

Everyone’s got black umbrella too, except me. Mine’s purple, go figure, the only one I could find in the house. So here I am, sixteen, bawling my eyes out with my purple umbrella in a sea of black suits and ties and veils, wearing my last year’s costume for our school’s musical: a navy blue suit modeled after the ones they had in the 1960’s, since that’s the only one I got.

Dammit. She was in that musical, too.

They’re burying an empty casket. Cas…Caskets. Her and her brother. The bodies weren’t found. Some part of me wants to desperately hope that they weren’t there, but James never left the house, and Mellissa’s been seen nowhere since. They probably burnt past recognition and got mistaken for a piece of furniture…

God, look at the rain, look at the suit and tie people, anything but the mind’s eye image of their blackened, burnt bodies lying on the living room floor.

D-Dorian’s here? I probably wouldn’t have noticed him if I hadn’t been so intent on looking at my ... Dorian? Really? I guess they were acquaintances…I shouldn’t trash him now. I mean, it’s a funeral.

Is he looking at me? He looks…He doesn’t look like anything. But he’s here, so that’s got to say something.

The woman to my right sobbing. It’s her English teacher. I have her for English next semester…She’s good, Melissa said she likes opinionated students who aren’t afraid to speak their minds. Just like me…

Melissa…What happened? How could this…happen?

Shit, Dorian’s still looking at me, isn’t he? I bet he knows it’s not just rain on my face. There’s red in my eyes too, after all.

Fuckin’ rain.