Submitted For Feedback: Absent Spirit

I don’t like wakes.

I’ve always thought they were a bit morbid and daft. My mother insisted we have one for Bailey, though we had to keep the casket closed. His friends came in, filed past the wooden box and said a prayer as they went. There was bad coffee and stale cookies and the whole place reeked of old potpourri.

I had one for Mother as well. That day, it was only me, sitting there in the same cold, reeking room that we’d had for Bay. Ten hours, just sitting, staring at my mother’s corpse. No one came. No one cared. I decided that day, I’d never attend another of these morbid experiments in grief ever again, yet here I am.


The closest place was Diamond and Sons in Laughlin, but it didn’t feel right to take him so far away. Searchlight was his home. He said it was the only place that ever made him feel as though he really belonged. I never thought I’d have to see someone laid out among the books and charms, but then I never thought I’d have to bury a friend in this little desert town either.

The casket is grey steel, shining under the overhead lights that create this lurid little shrine to the dead, with a bronze crucifix gleaming on the lower half of the lid. The people from the Laughlin mortuary were contracted to set this all up for us, and the gaudy display of flowers and lights sickens me here. Liam moved the raised level shelves back to make room for the casket; I tried to help but my hands went weak, arms limp at my sides, at the very thought of touching those shelves that he had made just for me.

Standing here now, I still can’t believe it. Everyone is here; his mother and father, aunts and uncles, cousins and half-cousins and third-cousins and on and on. His family is much larger than even I had realized and they must have loved him as dearly as the family he had made here, to come all this way. The wake should not be until tomorrow, but they were here already and the mortuary had finished their work, so here we are. His mother had agreed with me, that he should be buried here. He’d left no instructions for us, only a few brief scribbled notes on a legal pad in a little lockbox he still kept in his room at the house.

No cremation, because the thought of burning all away frightened him. Catholic mass, if possible. Send a letter to a post office box in Seattle, addressed only to ‘Eddie’, to let him know. His car to a young cousin, Erica. The papers still spoke of his Mustang, though I suppose we could take it to mean his Jeep at this point. Ring a tattoo shop in Wisconsin and leave a message for someone called ‘Chicago Ed’. Send a letter to an elderly professor at a seminary in Chicago. Simple things. Little things.

He wants me to have all of his books and magickal supplies.
He wants Destiny to have his confirmation cross, the one he wore hidden beneath his clothes, everyday. I wonder if he ever took it off.

He doesn’t look right. They never do, really, laying there in a box. You can give the mortuary people as many photos as you’d like, they never get it right. Thick paste of make-up made him far too light in tone. The man had worn a perpetual tan for three years now; it just wasn’t right.

They’d smoothed back his hair, which was all wrong. It was longer than he would have liked now, no time for a cut in recent days. I reach out and push my fingers through the dark locks, brushing them down to fall in his face, messy and reckless and so very normal for him. Seemed wrong that there was no sawdust; he was always littered in sawdust when he was working, golden brown flecks adhered to his clothes and falling from his hair with every movement he made.

Thick dark lashes – too thick for a boy, I’d told him, such a waste on a boy, and he’d laughed and told me his mother always said the same. Of course they are closed, his eyes, and find myself wishing for just one more glance from him, one last look into the laughing brown eyes that I had taken for granted every day. The light had danced in his eyes. I wonder if beneath the lids they’ve already gone dull and filmy and dark.

His mouth is the worst of it. It always is at these things. Gone slack, corners pulled down from resting on the back, muscles dead and useless. Gravity pulls it down, making a wide, deep frown, skin puddle there like dripping wax so that it doesn’t even seem real. Some strange dripping-mouth mask; soon it would all slip away.

I keep waiting for him to sit up, to laugh, to tell me it was all a joke.
Just sit up, Aidan. Please. Just open your eyes. I won’t be angry, I promise. Tell me it was all not real and I will believe you and I won’t be mad, I won’t be mad at all.
I know he won’t; I know he can’t. But still as I gaze down at him I am begging, pleading in my mind for a wink and a smile and a short deep laugh.

I don’t want to forget what it sounds like to hear him laugh.
I can’t remember my father’s voice or Bailey’s eyes or even my mother and shrill, berating tones. Please, God, don’t let me forget him too. Don’t let me forget Aidan too. I can’t. I couldn’t stand it.

He’d had no suit or dress clothes. All we found in his closet was a crisp red button-down shirt, and a pair of black slacks that looked oddly dated. Still, they would have to do, and I can see how it complements him now. They’d been stored in a box on his closet floor with a black masquerade mask and a book of Poe; I placed them at the foot of the casket, since they carried some meaning for him that I am not to understand.

His hands are folded in front of him and I pull the small black satin bag of runes from the pocket of my sweater. He had many sets, all left to me, but these were his working stones, the ones he used the most. Carved by his own hand, stained by his own blood. I place them in his hands; he’d left them for me to do as I please, and I want them to go with him. They are as much a part of him as his scarred hands, as the mapwork of tattoos he wore and wide, cheerful grin he always had. As much a part of him as the perpetual bump on his head from the underside of the counter he had built. He should have them now.

His hands are cold and heavy and stiff, so strange to me as I push the little bag into his dead grip and feel the cold smoothness of his skin. These hands had built the bookshelves that surrounded the coffin. These hands had built the countertop and the table in my kitchen, the shed in my yard and poured the concrete on my basement floor. These hands had bled and painted runes to bring protection. These hands had carried me, lifted me from possession and brought me back to life and myself. These hands will shrink and shrivel and wither away to dust and bone and the bile rises in my throat as I think of it.

I want to turn them over, and look at his lifeline. I had tried to read his palms but I never really understood it all. What did I miss? Is it there, written on his hands? Should I have known this would happen? If I had known, couldn’t I have stopped it?

It has to be a mistake. It has to be wrong. Somewhere someone made a huge cosmic error and it’s not Aidan, not Aidan who was supposed to die. Someone else. Someone else, far away from here, who was meant to be laying in a box, and not Aidan.
Or maybe closer. Maybe it was me. Maybe someone just made a mistake and I’m supposed to be dead now and that would be better and right because I don’t have a family to leave behind and I’m the one who is always in trouble and getting hurt and I’m the one who is weak so it should be me, me in the box because he is better than me and deserves better than this and needs to be up and alive and smiling with his family and with Destiny and even with Sam.

I close my eyes and stop the tears, order them away, for another day.
Wakes are not for crying and carrying on. Wakes are for keeping composure and making sure everyone else is okay and that the coffee isn’t burned in the big silver coffeemaker set out on the counter and that the cookies and cakes aren’t gone stale on the platter beside it. Wakes are for handing out tissues and smiling at the memories the guests will talk about and pausing to stare at the posterboard full of photographs near the door and holding his mother as she shakes with sobs.

I will not go home tonight. I will not go home tomorrow, or the day after. I will stay here, stay with Aidan, and wait for the morning of the funeral at the dusty graveyard where not so long ago he lay bleeding and dying until a Slayer found him. Then, after it is over and his family has gone home, I will go home and take many pills from the little bottle on my nighttable.

Then I will sleep. And maybe when I wake again, this will all just have been a nightmare.