Attending a Funeral -- Original fiction
Title: Attending a Funeral
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Toshi, Ni
Warnings: Hints of necrophilia of a sort, major weirdness
She was really beautiful, but this was still a crazy idea. It’d been awhile since Toshi had been in an actual church, and he hadn’t realized it would be so dry inside. He felt like coughing. His shoulders kept shaking with repressed chokes. Ni seemed fine beside him, but he kept tugging at his earring. A nervous habit. Toshi watched as some choir of high school girls started singing in Latin. Or French. But probably Latin.
“This is stupid,” Ni muttered to him, thankful for the sound of the organ and the song. “Why are we here?”
“We’ll leave soon,” Toshi promised without meaning it. He looked back at the girl in the casket. He didn’t know her. In fact, he didn’t know anyone here. He’d just seen her picture in the obituaries and had talked Ni into talking him to the funeral service, because he’d never been to one before. And she was really beautiful.
“You don’t want to have sex with her or something, do you?” Ni asked, sounding concerned. “You better not. If you’re a necrophiliac, you can’t get back in my car.”
“Yeah, and I’m just gonna tell you that I wanna bone a dead girl. Right.” Toshi rolled his eyes and leaned forward a little, so he could see the details of the ruffles on her crushed velvet red dress. “They should have put her in green. A light green. That red makes her look pale.”
“She’s pale because she’s dead, stupid.” Ni was uncomfortable; Toshi could feel it. “Come on.”
“Soon. I think the priest is about to start praying.” Toshi had never prayed, but he liked to listen to other people when they did. Sometimes he pretended they were praying to him. He liked to feel like God every now and then. He glanced around at everyone bowing their heads. “They’re praying to me,” he whispered, a little hoarse. “I’m gonna take care of her now, in Heaven.” He paused. “Yeah, she doesn’t look like a girl who’d go anywhere but Heaven. I bet she wouldn’t even let her boyfriends see her naked.” Toshi would have laughed, Ni stood up suddenly. “Hey-”
“I’m outta here,” Ni muttered, not even sparing him a last minute glance over the shoulder as he escape the pew and quickly exited through the heavy sanctuary doors.
Toshi stood in the narthex of the church, looking at all the people in black. All these people knew her; they all saw her and spoke to her when her eyes were open and sparkling. They were with her when she laughed. He wondered if she’d laughed through her nose like he did, or through her teeth, or if her mouth would open wide and she would rock back and forth with mirth. He wondered which girl had been her best friend, which man was her uncle, which boy with glasses tried to pass her notes in math class.
The mother was the only obvious one. She seemed perpetually stuck in the center, dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, having her shoulder rubbed and her hand squeezed. Before he knew it, Toshi approached her and spoke.
“Ma’am, I’m so very sorry for your loss. She was a lovely girl.”
The mother looked at him with moist eyes, brow furrowing as she took in his dyed violet hair, triple ear piercings, and faded jeans.
“You were a friend of hers?”
“We were…recent acquaintances, actually.” Not a complete lie, really. “I go to her school. We met at lunch, maybe a few weeks ago. We didn’t have classes together, but she was a terrific study buddy.”
The mother smiled and something in her face emanated a sort of recognition.
“Are you that nice boy who lent her notes for German?”
“Yes, that’s me.” Toshi’s cheeks hurt from smiling to make up for his lying.
“Oh well, thank you. That meant so much to her. That was the first German test she got an A on this year.”
“Really?” Later, Toshi might be a little unnerved by how easy it was to fall into a lie. “I’m glad to hear that I could help. She was really beautiful.”
“She was,” the mother nodded slowly. “She really was.”
Toshi stepped back and watched them for awhile. He let his mind wander with a fantasy. All these people were there, but this time they were in colors-pink and yellow and blue. And he was mingling among them, with her on his arm; she wore light green and laughed through her nose with him. He loved her and they were going to be married; there were going to have beautiful children. Ni and his wife would take them both out for their anniversaries and would be two perfect couples together, and she would look pale under the moonlight. And he would die first, so she could go to his funeral and tell his mom that he was beautiful. It would be only fair.
Ni stood by his car, sucking moodily on a cigarette and tapping his foot against the gravel of the parking lot. Toshi made his way towards him without hesitance, but something not unlike shamefulness. He stopped in front of the other man and waited silently.
“There’s something wrong with you,” Ni said eventually, releasing smoke from his mouth with a sigh and tossing the cigarette to the ground. Toshi stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. “And I’m never doing something like this again.”
“All right,” Toshi consented quickly.
“I hate funerals.”
“All right.”
Ni eyed him warily, like Toshi was someone he’d never seen before in his life who’d suddenly come up and asked him, “How’d that German test go?”
Toshi rested his forehead against the window as the car pulled out of the lot and onto the road. He wondered how many people like her died each day. He wondered how many young girls he could know, or could have known. He wondered if any of them were beautiful.
“You should try the library next time you want to find a girlfriend.”
Toshi nodded, murmured a quiet “yeah” in agreement. Ni was still uncomfortable. He vaguely realized that he usually would’ve tried to soothe him by rubbing his hand on his thigh; Ni said he didn’t like that, but it made him laugh anyway, as did all of Toshi’s attempts to be seductive. He didn’t today. He closed his eyes and started seeing everybody in caskets. He thought he might want to be a mortician one day. He decided not to tell Ni, though. He might get thrown out of the car. He couldn’t afford that right now. Ni was his only friend, and that wasn’t enough for a funeral.