She saw the casket being lowered into the ground. It sank like the sun below the waves, but a granite sun, a grey one, and the waves were only made of earth and were never going to move again after the men with the shovels left.
Her brother clutched at her mother’s dress and sobbed loudly, his sniffles the only sounds in the graveyard. She wanted to hit him and tell him to shut up; the woman was a distant family friend of her grandparents and they didn’t even know her name.
Names didn’t matter anyway. Not when you started to rot away in a stone prison.
“Mother,” she said later when the service had ended. “How does she get to heaven?”
“She flies, sweetheart.”
What a strange answer. “How can she fly if she’s stuck underneath all that dirt?”
“Do you kids want lunch?”
Her brother squealed and started shouting for McDonald’s; she gingerly climbed into the backseat and wondered how long it would take for the smell of death to go away when it had weighed her down like an anchor.
She thought her mom was stupid. There wasn’t anything in that coffin to be flown at all; there were just some white roses and a corpse that were going to be nothing more than bones and dust.