1.a) Dorothea: Her four daughters – my mother, three aunts – used colored Post-Its to mark which of Doro’s belongings they each wanted to keep. Once they took what they wanted, their children, including myself and my brothers, used colored pieces of string to mark anything we wanted, though there wasn’t much in the house that would appeal to children. Once the things we’d selected had been taken away, the house was sold and demolished.
We took home her glass paper weights, her antique dolls, and a yellow enameled Dutch oven. I also took a cardboard gift box that had probably once held a necklace. I filled it with waxy, succulent weeds from Doro’s back yard, intending to keep it forever as a memorial. I kept the box in my room and monitored the decay of the plants on a daily basis. After they had completely mulched, I broke my resolution and threw the soggy, rotten box away.
2.a) Alan: Before he became ill, Alan would ask the children loud questions he didn’t seem to want answered. Questions like, “What were you doing in there?” or “What are you making that face for?” I dreaded these exchanges. I never felt I was participating in them as I was expected to, because he’d bark the next question before I’d answered the first one. No one else in that house asked loud, ultimately unanswerable questions. Everyone was hushed at his funeral and then they took that hush around with them. He had excelled at filling that horrible hush.
3a.) David: David died within twenty-four hours of showing symptoms. The imprecise nature of those symptoms bothered all of us: headache, irritability, aversion to light. His funeral was held in a large Episcopal chapel. Several hundred stunned people attended. My family and I went together, and watched David’s family struggle to address the fact of his dying so young, before they had even had an opportunity to not find him irritating. Later, we heard that David’s mother went through his computer and read or watched everything in his browser history in an attempt to create a simulacrum of his mind at the time of his death. I don’t know what anyone else thought of that, but I always wondered if she ever felt she’d achieved her goal.
5a.) Name?: I want to say that boyfriend’s aunt’s name was Bridget, but it couldn’t have been, because his mother was Bridget. I’d never met his aunt. In fact, that boyfriend had never really mentioned his aunt until she died and we had to make room in our schedules for her funeral. In spite of having no emotional connection to the deceased, about ten minutes into the service I became overwhelmed by grief. I burned. I panicked. I burst into tears. I wept loudly, possibly louder than anyone else. I couldn’t get a hold of myself. I wept so hard I had to be supported on the way back to the car. I wept for hours. I’ll never know what came over me.
6a.) Father James: At my first job I was a snippy, unpopular waitress and Father James was my only regular customer. We talked about literature. He brought me an annotated copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I talked about Graham Greene. He told me about his youth, his Jesuit education. I talked more about Graham Greene.
After I’d graduated college and left home and come home again, I read in the newspaper that Father James had peacefully passed on. I went alone to his funeral mass at a large Catholic mission toward the edge of the city. I sat patiently through the whole Mass, considering the sunlight, the vaulted ceilings, Medieval Literature, Modern Literature. I smiled at several people but spoke to no one. He always called me The Minimalist. I don’t remember why.
5b.) Jill. I remember now. The name of that boyfriend’s aunt, over whom I mysteriously wept for hours, was Jill.
4a.) Mr. Barrios. I don’t recall his first name. It’s possible I never knew it. The woman I worked with, his widow, was named Letty Barrios. She held a wake on a Saturday, which meant no one from work (a restaurant) was able to go. Except me. I never worked on Saturdays. I wore black and I wore heels. I was over dressed and knew no one there but the bereaved. She wore jeans and a grey t-shirt. It was the first and only time I ever saw her out of her uniform.
There was no actual wake. Letty just served her late husband’s friends beers from a cooler while they gruffly chatted the way I imagined they had many times before in that very yard. Why else would she have so many folding chairs around? How else would everyone seem to know exactly where to sit? She thanked me for coming and complimented my shoes, the heels of which sank into the dirt, leaving a trail of pocks behind me. She asked if I’d prefer wine, she had some inside. I said a beer was fine. As she fetched it from the ice, she said, “It was the craziest thing, you know? We don’t even know how long he was lying out here.” She cracked the beer open, handed it to me. “I mean, he could have been out here half the day.” She spoke with the matter of fact tone of a mad woman. She never sat down once.
Allegra Frazier’s fiction has appeared in Story Magazine, Carrier Pigeon, Paragraphiti, theNewerYork, and elsewhere. She was the winner of Bayou Magazine’s 2013 flash fiction contest, and serves as associate fiction editor for Origins Literary Journal. She was raised in Arizona.
–Art by Rona Keller