Funeral Rites

I'm at a funeral. There's all kinds of people there: friends, family, teachers, police, judge, jury, all the people who've hurt me and a whole bunch of people I don't recognise. I think it's a church, but the stained glass window at the back isn't of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or some saint. It's just this patchwork of colours, red and yellow and black, and for some reason I don't like looking at it. Nobody around is really paying attention to me. That's fine. I'm content to just exist unobserved here.

Then they bring out the casket. It's closed at first and when they open it, everyone crowds round so much that I can't see. I have to push my way through the crowd, shoving with all the force I can muster, just so I can get to the front at get a glimpse of who we're here for. I wish I hadn't. We're here for me. The girl in that casket is me.

She looks perfect. Her skin is porcelain pale, her hair is as luxuriously long as if she were alive and there's not so much as a blemish on the pure white dress they've dressed her in. I know they dressed her in it because I wouldn't wear that dress, and yet I'm staring at myself covered in white, smiling gently with my eyes closed as if I was just sleeping. I know I'm not sleeping. This is a funeral. She's dead.

I look around to everyone else and someone starts chanting my name. The others join in, quietly and mournfully and raising into a deafening roar. None of them see that I'm losing my balance or that I'm gritting my teeth to withstand their demanding yells. I close my eyes, breathing deeply in the hopes that soon they'll stop.

Something happens that silences the crowd. I open my eyes and stare at my corpse. She opened her eyes. She sits up, still smiling gently as she snaps her head round to look at me. Her gaze is hollow and blank. The crowd doesn't notice. They stare expectantly. Soon they're cheering my name, her name, once again in that terrible roar.

She stands up in her coffin. She curtseys politely and I can see her skin fading from perfect porcelain to sickly grey. She leaps delicately from the coffin to the stage behind and without skipping a beat she dances. The crowd claps and cheers thunderously with every twirl and boos every misstep. They still don't realize she's dead.

I try to rush for the stage but the crowd is too dense this time, too thick with rapturous applause and scathing criticism. I have to stand from a distance, watching my corpse perform for this crowd as I remain invisible to them. A finger falls off, but none of them react. She just picks it up and reattaches it, but the pain bolts through my body and remains. At some point her foot falls off and the same happens: the crowd mindlessly observes, my cadaver affixes it to herself and I bear the agony.

Soon she's nothing but a patchwork mess. The rot is obvious now between the stitches, her ashen skin and empty stare. Nobody else can see it, but I can. Nobody knows this should be a funeral, but I do. I scream, desperate for someone to understand that they're watching a dead thing dance, but I can't be heard above their cheers. I see the threads stretching up from her to a dark cloud above. The one pulling the strings is obscured and shapeless.

The strings jerk abruptly and sever her head from her neck. The head goes flying and from instinct, I catch it. The crowd turns to face me. Maybe now they'll understand it. Or not. Anger and hatred radiates from their stares. They circle me, hands reaching out to hold me in place while her head smiles vacantly. Her body weaves effortlessly through the throngs of people until she joins me inside the circle. She snatches her head from my hands and holds it against my ear.

“They don't want you,” She whispers, “They want me.”

She reattaches her head just as the crowd begins reaching for her instead. They drag her back to the stage and she does nothing to resist them, even as they pull at her hair and grab at every inch of her. They throw her back to the stage and she continues performing, the smile on her face never wavering for a second. A few members of the crowd have noticed me now. They hold me in place, cutting off all options of escape.

All I can do is watch my corpse dance for them.