Gloves

Calder adjusted his gloves; a size too big, they didn’t seem to fit quite right.

The procession wasn’t particularly long, even if a decent handful of people had shown up. The hymns, the speeches, and the singing had filtered by in a slow, monotonous blur. His watch, annoyingly, was only just hidden beneath the black sleeve of his formal jacket, and he felt it too rude to adjust it and look down at the time, which he was sure was pulling his leg and going by as slowly as possible on purpose.

People were crying, as they tended to do at funerals. The family clustered around the coffin - closed casket – and varied between the discreet dabbing of watering eyes or the mournful, bitter wail of a mother’s sobs.

A brilliant actress.

Of course, some of the attendees didn’t know the late man so well, and politely sat in their seats: still, quiet, and only slightly awkward. Calder wondered if some of them really needed to be here, or if they were just here for the novelty of it.

He kept a schooled expression, hands neatly folded in his lap, and his gaze stayed on the casket, the family. Something distasteful curled in his chest.

“You’re all my family, I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

When the police had announced that they hadn’t been able to recover a body, it wasn’t really unexpected. The man had been missing for days, with no sightings or links to his sudden disappearance, only the misplaced remains of his belongings discovered drifting in the river that Friday.

The blood tested from the jacket had been his, so to rule his disappearance as a death was an evident course of action. It was only right to assume the man was gone, and police weren’t going to waste their time on a case as unimportant as this: a simple disappearance with solid evidence. They had other things to do with their time and money, and they weren’t going to drain it looking for someone who was likely already dead; it didn’t matter to them if the grieving family got any closure. Didn’t matter if it was murder or suicide.

“They’re lowering the casket now.”

The low whisper from his right side gathered his attention, and he cast a glance at the speaker. Chase shuffled awkwardly in his seat next to him, coughing discreetly into his hand. His shirt was slightly ill-fitting, stretching around his broad shoulders too tightly.

Calder nodded, and stood quietly, watching Chase subtly nudge Jasper, who had zoned out a long while ago, into standing up. The three headed over, following the small, somber crowd to form a sort of oval shape around the pit in the ground.

“Oh, you’re the friends of the deceased, right?” An older man spotted the three, and without asking, pushed them to the inner section of the circle. “You should be at the front; he was important to you.”

Calder nodded curtly and adjusted his footing, herding the two younger men to stand neatly beside him, not bothering to maintain any eye contact with the stranger. He reached over and adjusted Jasper’s crudely done tie, a brusque signal to the man that they didn’t want any further conversation. He felt the man’s gaze linger briefly on the back of his head before he turned away, muttering something about how people die so young nowadays before he disappeared into the shuffling crowd.

Beside him, Chase tugged at his collar, eyes scanning the attendees beneath dark, furrowed brows. Jasper was as silent as he had been since he arrived, gaze fixed downwards on his shoes; they were too polished, too unlike the scuffed trainers he always wore.

The priest announced something at the head of the pit, garbling into the old microphone, and the casket was lowered into the ground. Calder stared at it. Handfuls of dirt were tossed down, slowly covering the empty box, sealing it in the earth forever, pointlessly.

He fussed with his gloves, subtly tugging them further over his hands.

The sky was frigid, grey. The trees were dead coral; whittled skeletons of better seasons. November was bitter and cold, frosty and numb. The sun was gone; a semi-permanent fog lingered on the gravel roads, unable to be chased away by the weak attempts at daylight.

A cursory glance at the onlookers showed Calder the rest of their little group dotted sparsely amongst the throng of stone faces. Lucky and Sandy stood quietly, pale, their hands gripped tightly together. Cole stood in icy silence, his expression unfeeling, not displaying at all the pain, the war behind his eyes.

“Our little snail, you should put yourself out there more, Cole.” Dotingly, a tender hand carded through the boy’s brown hair. A bonfire flickered, the group sat in a ragtag circle around it, soaking up the warmth.

The words rang in Calder’s head, a warm, gentle voice that slipped away like dust: he crushed the sound in his fist and threw it against his skull; it barrelled deep into the bone.

His gaze didn’t falter, and blankly, he continued to watch as the funeral workers shovelled dirt into the pit, sealing it shut forever.

He felt a set of eyes on him, and didn’t need to look up to know it was the disapproving stare of the late boy’s mother. She tried to crack open his skin, pry the seams open and peer inside, but he didn’t let her. He ignored her piercing gaze, and his own eyes never left the burial, his shoulders steadfast and his head angled straight ahead stubbornly.

He heard her click her tongue, muttering something under her breath. The sound slithered through her pursed lips, and her sharp pupils slipped from Calder, sliding cynically between their little group, dissatisfaction curling witheringly on her gaunt face.

He saw Blanche duck his head to avoid her stare, anxiously stepping behind Manx, who glared straight back at her. He had never bothered to hide his returned dislike for her, and even at the funeral of their son, he didn’t care to conceal it. His cattish gaze burning directly into her arrogant one until she briskly cocked her head away, her long earrings clinking against the taut skin of her neck.

From the corner of his eye, Calder saw a broad silhouette appear at her shoulder. He didn’t need to turn to see the dark, weathered face of her husband: the thick brows over critical, cold eyes, the swollen, crimson nose, the perpetual glare that never left his face, and probably never would. Even when Calder was a teenager, the man had looked the exact same as he did now in the brief moments he caught a glimpse of him in the grimy window of his house.

The man was bitter, cruel. Where the hands of a father should be warm and comforting, his were stiff, cold, and hard. His clothes would keep the sharp, chemical scent of liquor; he would catch breaths of it from the coats his son would borrow. Calder decided then that he would never drink, not if it turned people into that.

“It’s just a bruise, Calder. I fell over again.” A familiar laugh tinged with the awkwardness that came with an inability to lie, the dart of an anxious gaze to the side, avoiding eye contact altogether.

Always excuses. No one believed them. No one ever did.

His parents had never liked their little group. They were too loud, too rambunctious, too ambitious. They didn’t approve of them being friends with their son. Calder knew it was because they didn’t like him leaving the house, because every opening of their front door threatened to expose a little more of what happened behind it.

They all had futures, potential outside the empty little town they had the misfortune of being born into. They were free-spirits with wild, preposterous dreams, not confined to their dreary, sodden birthplace. They feared their only son would fly away with them on the wind like a dandelion seed, never to return.

Who would take care of them then? They couldn’t have that. Their filthy house would wallow in dust without a cleaner; they would starve without a cook.

Who would take the brunt of her alcoholic husband’s beatings? Who would make fumbled excuses for why his unfaithful snake of a wife was never home, slithering into the sullied bedsheets of the town’s men, already wed?

“I’m so tired.”

Calder rubbed his hands together; the wind was colder now. The gloves didn’t do much to stave off the cold.

The hole was completely closed. A stone was being fixed in place, the workers diligently adjusting its position in the ground. The priest watched the snake with ravenous eyes behind her husband’s back, who glanced dismissively at his pocket watch. There was the clink of metal against metal as he returned it to his breast pocket. It really was just another afternoon: the same empty, dull routine in this pitiful old town. The only difference was the startling emptiness of the young man’s missing presence.

Calder wondered when the family would realise their old car was missing. He didn’t think it would be any time soon.