Generous Donations of Someone Else's Money

Smashing her computer closed, she pinched her colorless lips together and eyed my mother with a practiced filth. It’s hard to say how long she’d known about the two of them. There are 10 years worth of pictures in our coffee table drawers, and more if you count the ‘70s, but Christ. Who would ever do that? Anyway, I don’t know what they keep in their coffee table at home, but I’d be willing to bet it was stupid and un-heartwarming.

My mother stood in the doorway, shrieking down the sterilized walls to her about being conscious in an unconscious world. About smashing your face between two Bibles, about stuffing sage under your fingernails, about burning incense into your retinas. But she had disappeared into the background of industrial fabrics and janitor’s keys, so I motioned her back into the room. Let it go.

His skin was a hymnal. Death had settled into his eyes, which were wet and agonizing. “We’re way, way off base,” and he pushed the meat off his bun and reached for my mother’s hands. I backed up to better observe. His face is a eulogy. No, no, much too removed. I should be more in the moment. I should say something about how there just isn’t any time or how yellow it is to act so hurt when someone is literally breathing their last breaths right in front of you. I can’t, though. I really just wanted him to have a nicer hamburger. I really just wished he could have had salt, instead of that Mrs. Dash bullshit.


We could have buried three Lutherans in the time it took for High Mass. There were no ham buns in the basement. No assortment of bereavement bars, and I didn’t really get all the kneeling and shit. The 21-gun salute was flaccid, but she and my mother stood over the casket, whimpering and shivering in the fur coats he had bought them years earlier.

The ground opened beneath him, to lower him to his eternal resting place, America’s biggest mall gleaming like the gates of St. Peter behind us. I shoved my hands in my pockets and mumbled along when the Catholics spoke in unison. Amen. Peace be with you. And also with you. And where might I get a nice hamburger around here?

The juice ran down the side of my hand and several napkins were required. I balled them up on my empty plate, satisfied. My mother swallowed two Xanax without water before paying the check. We drove without the radio. We imagined ourselves as priests, singing hymns off the faces of corpses and carving Eucharist from their soft inner arms and placing it on our tongues. We were removed and we were conscious. I pushed sage under the skin and she lit the incense, carefully packing the ash into his mouth. I covered the casket with my robe and stood naked in the colored light of a stained glass saint. Peace be with you. And also with you.