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

parked the van behind the house. The old mansion had a back door, reserved for deliveries. I think this was where they brought in the bodies, to prepare them for the services, but I wasn’t certain. An antiseptic odor that I imagined came from cleaning supplies and embalming fluid hung in the air.
    With a bulky arrangement cradled in my arms, I went to the back door. It was opened a crack, so I pushed it wide with my foot. I waited for my eyes to adjust from the bright sunshine. After a while, after calling out and no one answering, I ventured into the darkened back hall. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. No one was around, but that’s the way it was a few hours before a service. I pictured the funeral-home people upstairs, in their administrative offices, hurriedly tending to final details.
    The parlor I found up front was long and rectangular, with brass light fixtures and velvety sofas. The papered walls had a textured swirl pattern of moss green. Paintings hung in crusty frames, landscapes of rivers, prairies, and meadows. Over the fireplace was the main painting—of William Peterson, the first of the family proprietors. He looked stern; his cravat was stiff under his chin. I supposed the room looked exactly as it did when old William ran the place. It sort of freaked me out, being alone in that parlor. It was just me and the body in the casket. It was open for viewing. Old William watched me; it was like an episode of Scooby-Doo, where only the eyes move in the painting. I laid the floral arrangement below the casket.
    But something caught my eye—a flash, and quickly gone. I don’t know why I looked, that day, over to the top of the casket. Perhaps it was the shimmer of long blond hair.
    I stood and stared. Jesus. Young—she looked my age, maybe a little older. She wore a cardigan sweater, soft-looking and lilac, and a single strand of pearls. Her face had that slight bloating of the deceased, but it was smooth. A horizontal scar ran across the right side of her forehead, angling down into her manicured eyebrow. It threw off the symmetry of her otherwise perfect face. But in an odd way, it made her look more alluring and enigmatic.
    Her eyes were lined in black with little sharp points at the edges, her lips glossed light pink, her hands folded across her chest. The top of a black-and-white polka-dot skirt was visible. You couldn’t see her legs. She looked like she had lived in the fifties. Standing there, I stared. The more I looked, the more I itched to touch that soft sweater, run my fingertips down her arm or across her smooth face. I glanced over my shoulder.
    I didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.
    I looked down at her face. It occurred to me that I wished for something that could never be: I wanted her eyes to open. I wanted her to speak. I wished it. I really wished it. Just say something, anything at all.
    After a long while, or maybe it was just a minute, I shook my head to clear it. Then I went back out into the glaring sunlight to grab the rest of the flowers. After setting up the last of the arrangements, I looked at a sympathy card affixed to one delivery: Catherine Courington.
    I stared down at her one last time, puffed my cheeks, and exhaled. And I did it. I quickly ran my fingertips down the sleeve on her right arm, and it was as petal soft and fuzzy as I’d imagined.
    I turned and left.
     
    E very day that next week, I thought about her. Constantly. I wondered how she died. Sometimes, when I was driving down lonely country roads, passing an occasional car headed in the opposite direction, I imagined our life together, mine and Catherine’s. I knew how we fell in love. I knew how our lives unfolded together, how we’d mark the anniversary of our wedding each year by nothing more than reading passages of our favorite books late into the night. We were soul mates. I knew it at my very core.
    Does that sound weird? Probably. But it’s the God’s truth. Haven’t you ever seen a stranger