Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller, Mort Castle (Ed) Read Free Book Online

than any CGI. When presented with the chance to create an original crime story—informed by Bradbury—I felt as though I had been given the shoes from “The Sound of Summer Running.” The Bradbury mythos came over me in a seizure as I spun my little yarn: the sadness at the core of human nature, the love of the Golden Age of Movies, the scabrous view of capitalism, and the plain, unadorned beauty of friendship.
     
    —Jay Bonansinga

THE GIRL IN THE FUNERAL PARLOR
    Sam Weller
    W hen I was twenty, I got a job delivering flowers. Three days a week, I drove a maroon-colored Chevy van, the words FORGET ME NOT painted on the sides, down barren two-lane western Illinois county roads.
    There was a solitude to the job that I liked. As soon as the van was loaded and I drove away from the flower shop, no one could tell me what to do. Sometimes, on busy days, I would be gone for three, four hours, maybe longer. Talk radio and a supersized soda kept me company, and I just lived in my head.
    I delivered to offices all over town for all their celebrations—every week someone threw a faux fiesta, marking ersatz holidays like Sweetest Day (seriously, do we really need a Sweetest Day when we have Valentine’s Day?).
    Then there were Saturday mornings at churches, where weddings were set up; Saturday afternoons included dropping off arrangements for the following day’s services.
    I also delivered to rickety bungalows in our small city, brick apartment buildings in the center square, and lonesome houses miles outside of town. In winter, when it’s dark early and ghosts of snow drift across the rural highways, it’s always a little eerie. After driving down a gravel road to some farm, I’d have to step out into the subzero windchill and go up to the dark house. Sometimes, a dog with an apparent case of rabies would bark after I knocked. I’d wait a minute or two, hoping no one was home except Cujo—then I could just leave. But a light inevitably would blink on. I’d hear heavy footsteps; several dead bolts, one after another after another, being unlatched, and the door would open a sliver. A pale face would peer out.
    “Yes?”
    “Flower delivery!”
    In those moments, out there in the stubbly frozen hinterland, facing some stranger in shadow, I shivered, wondering if I would ever be seen or heard from again.
    Without a doubt, though, I found delivering to funeral parlors the weirdest of all. My job was to lay the flowers around the casket. Averting my eyes, I’d crouch and set up the floral sprays and plants quickly around the body and never once look. Sometimes, with a casket spray arrangement, I would actually have to place it on the closed bottom half of the coffin itself.
    It felt odd being there, alone with the dead. Here I was, a community-college kid studying English lit and living with his parents, arranging flowers over the mortal remains of the departed. They never knew me while they lived, and I felt like I was violating them in a way. It just felt wrong.
    On one of these occasions, at the old Peterson Funeral Home, I encountered Catherine Courington. She was dead, yet more alive than anyone I’d ever known.
    It was a morning in June, when specks of sunlight shone brilliantly through oak leaves over the funeral home, casting a champagne glow. The van was packed from end to end and perfumed heavily with fountains of crimson pansies, white lilies, plum peonies, and waxen orchids. The labels on some of the flowers were marked:
     
    PETERSON FUNERAL HOME—COURINGTON SERVICE
     
    The Peterson family had run that funeral home for more than a hundred years, in a Victorian built atop a hill in town that led down to the Rock River. A cupola topped the three-story house, and a winding red-brick walkway led up to a wraparound porch. Hanging geranium baskets twisted in the hot summer breeze. Lead-glass windows, thick and wide, were set on the façade, and they were all gauzed over on the inside with delicate lace curtains.
    I