speaker at the funeral
ADAM MCOMBER
Only a few of us are in attendance.
It’s Wednesday. Raining. Not a good day to go outside.
The deceased is called Robert. He lies in his coffin at the front of the chapel. Robert wears a faded suit. His hair is combed in thick grooved lines.
Robert worked with us at the factory. He manned the lathe. The edges of his mouth were downturned. Robert had no wife or children. Or perhaps he had a wife when he was young.
Sometimes, Robert fell asleep in the room where we ate our dinner. We made jokes about the sort of dreams Robert might have.
At the beginning of the funeral, a young man approaches the lectern. He is bearded, long-fingered. We do not recognize this man. Yet we understand he is meant to introduce the speaker.
We wonder why Deacon Bradford has not appeared. The deacon is a friendly man. He always asks us about our wives and children. Normally, he introduces the speaker at every funeral. But today we do not see him.
The bearded man removes three yellow papers from his pocket. He spreads the papers on the lectern. Then, he lights a candle. The flame is dim.
Most of what he says, we cannot hear.
When the man finishes speaking, he folds his papers and puts them back into his pocket. He steps down from the lectern and sits in a pew near the front of the chapel.
We wait for the speaker.
There is always a speaker, someone who pays tribute to the dead. Surely, there will even be a man willing to pay tribute to Robert. But today, no speaker appears.
We wonder if there has been some error.
We look at the bearded man for an answer. But he merely sits in his pew, staring down at his long fingers.
Finally, a door opens at the rear of the chapel. It is the door that leads to Deacon Bradford’s office. We find ourselves relieved. Deacon Bradford is late, but now he will come and say cheerful things. Even at funerals, he is cheerful. Death, he told us once, is the beginning of something new.
But it is not the deacon who emerges from the office. It is the speaker.
The speaker is a woman, tall and broadly shaped. She wears a pale dress made of lace. We have seen our grandmothers and great-grandmothers wearing such dresses in old pictures. But the speaker is not like our grandmothers or great-grandmothers. She is too tall and too thin. And though she wears no veil, we find we cannot clearly see the speaker’s face.
When the speaker passes our pew, we see her mouth and only her mouth. Her lips are closed and pulled tight. There are teeth under her lips.
The speaker approaches the lectern. Light from the dim candle shines on her.
We wonder how this woman knew Robert.
When her words finally come, the speaker seems already to be in the middle of her talk. She speaks in a low whisper. And she does not seem to be talking about Robert.
Soon, we begin to feel as if we are no longer in the chapel.
Instead, we find ourselves in a dark chamber.
Confused, we move toward the door, toward an odd light.
We pass through the door and find a pale landscape.
The land is not made of earth. Instead, it is composed entirely of bodies. The bodies are similar to that of the speaker, tall and thin, dressed in pale lace. They are laid side by side in such a way as to form what looks like furrowed fields and low rolling hills.
We step into the landscape.
In order to walk, we must tread on the bodies. We feel lace beneath our feet, slippery and soft. We walk on chests and closed mouths.
In the distance stands a tower. The tower too is made of pale bodies, all stacked one upon the next.
We enter the tower through an arched door made of long limbs. Inside, we see a staircase made of bodies.
At the top of the tower, we find a room that contains machines like the machines in our own factory. Here is the milling machine and the gear shaper. Here is the hone and even the lathe where Robert himself used to sit.
Yet none of the machines in the tower are made of metal like the ones in our factory.
These machines are made of bodies dressed in white lace.
The bodies crouch and contort. Arms and legs form racks and treadles. Fingers are levers. Mouths are holes for milling.
We want to flee down the tower stairs.
And yet find we cannot move.
We are forced to think of Robert at his lathe, his dark eyes, his downturned mouth.
We wonder again what kind of dreams Robert might have had.
The machines in the tower stare at us.
Fleshy upturned faces. Rigid, claw-like hands.
Adam McOmber is the author of three novels: The Ghost Finders (JournalStone), Jesus and John (Lethe) and The White Forest (Simon and Schuster) as well as two collections of queer speculative fiction, This New & Poisonous Air and My House Gathers Desires (BOA Editions). His new collection of stories, Fantasy Kit, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in June 2022. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Diagram and numerous other magazines and journals. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the editor in chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain Review.