Formalities

By Kaycee Browning

Crossing my arms, I scowl at his gravestone. It’s a struggle to keep this aria of screams and sobs inside the icy wind of my mind instead of releasing it into the icy wind around me. He’d only seen me cry once; I’m not going to cry now.

After a few moments of concentration, I swipe the tears away, and my eyes adjust to the dim light. The flickering gold of the parking lot street lamp illuminates bold, black words, stark against snow and stone.

CHRISTOPHER EARNEST SHAW. BELOVED HUSBAND. 1994-2018.

The ridiculousness of everything causes any lingering weepiness to vanish. In its void, I’m left with the sudden, curious urge to greet Christopher. A formality, I suppose.

Sirens scream in the distance, and I glance away from the grave to the highway. The thin line of trees surrounding the churchyard hides the road, but the flashing blue and red lights shine through the branches and reflect off the falling snow as the cars speed by. They pass the exit to the church and fade into the darkness. Not for me, then. Good.

I grab my shovel and start digging.

The snow is easy to remove. It’s been falling for only a few hours. I hit dirt.

I pause. I feel untoward. Should I say hello?

No, I’m being ridiculous. I plow the shovel into the ground, stomping on the blade, smiling as it slices into the dirt, and flinging it as far away from Christopher as possible. I do it again. And again. And again.

My mind ebbs away from the simplicity of the actions of plow, stomp, and throw to the less simple. I can almost hear Christopher’s voice, the words slicing through my memory like the shovel through dirt.

“Flesh and fantasies and right and wrong: that’s everything that we are. Heidi, you are mine, and I am yours. We belong together more than the winter and the cold, but we will be the death of us both. It’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s Veronica and J.D. It’s Orpheus and Eurydice.”

Lines from a thousand conversations we had over the years mesh into a medley. More dirt joins the growing pile behind me, and I repeat the words I said in all of those conversations, my mantra, my to be or not to be.

“Is death really such a bad thing?”

The only reply is the faint rumble of cars on the highway, the cold wind whistling against my jacket hood, and the vague buzz of the streetlamp behind me. My words feel wrong. I should have asked about his day. I should have said goodbye.

I should have murdered his wife, too.

“You were always so afraid,” I bite out. “You acted brave. You acted bold. You acted—” I cut myself off with a harsh laugh. “You were always acting.”

I don’t fault him for acting. All the world’s a stage, and money is difficult to gain. Everyone does what they’ve got to do in order to maneuver themselves into the lead role instead of forever being relegated to an existence as Tree #2. That makes sense to me. That’s life.

I fault him for always acting. There are times when the stage darkens, the curtain falls, and everyone goes home. Throughout childhood, we were the only true lights we knew, the sunlight in this fluorescence of an existence. Throughout college, the burning realness became better, and we became much more than friends and confidantes. We were home to one another,  one with each other. No acting or masks or stages.

But then he found an audience rich enough to inspire a forever show. The audience was named Emily Lintz, and she was insane. Some people say that insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results. That’s ridiculous. No, insanity is believing something to be reality when it is clearly a delusion. Emily believed Christopher loved her, and so she married him. She continued to believe her false narrative despite Christopher’s nightly visits to me and the many, many laughs he and I had over a beer concerning her prissy, insipid ridiculousness.

Eventually, he went insane and started believing Emily’s delusion himself. He visited me, but that day, he didn’t greet me with a burst of impassioned anecdotes or even a rehearsed soliloquy on the state of his life.

Instead, he simply said, “Hello, Heidi. How are you?”

I did not wait to hear anything else. I hit him.

The shovel hits metal.

I’m surprised to find him so soon, but after all, my cursory research had informed me that most coffins are not buried six feet under anymore. It’s more like two and a half, nowadays. Pity. He would have liked the poetic nature of being buried six feet under, and I would have liked to keep raging and digging and remembering. But I can’t stay in my mind forever. A confrontation is a confrontation, and I have to see him.

I scrape the dirt away from the casket, toss away the shovel, and feel for the latches along the side.

The latch snags my glove as it snaps open.

He’s so close. What should I say?

Sirens shriek from the highway. Police lights flash through the trees.

I laugh. The cavalry arrives at the last second. How cliche. I unlatch the second.

The lid falls to the side with a doleful creak, and although I’d wanted to scream at him, I don’t. Instead of a confrontation, I feel the need to offer him a greeting. A formality. A forgiveness.

The police cars speed down the exit to the church. I don’t have much time to chat.

“Christopher. It’s Heidi. How are you?”

He doesn’t answer. How strange. He looks exactly the same, and I wonder if something is wrong with me. Shouldn’t he have rotted by now? I dismiss the thought.

I smile down at him. “It’s good to see you again.”

Can you guess which song inspired this story? (This month it could be any time period, any genre.) Share in the comments!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kaycee Browning is a recent college graduate from North Carolina. With the sudden influx of free time that comes with escaping college, she is working to regain the writing momentum she had as a high schooler while also balancing work life and grad school. She has been previously published in Rooglewood’s Five Enchanted Roses collection.

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