The Topography
of a Wake
To avoid her husband’s casket, Virginia counts her family members and places them outside in the landscape.
Her brother Ralph, maroon-faced with bourbon, brashing opinions, is a mudslide over a main road, seeking attention by holding back cars.
Messy, earthy, and ridiculously unpractical.
Joking, straight-spined, her brother Hal, the mouth of a river, almost inviting for a swim, almost soothing, except for the kelp or seaweed or whatever you call that knotted green stuff on the shore, bubbly and smelly.
Sister Susan, following Hal’s lead, surrounds him with amenable laughter. As a natural dam, she prevents salmon from spawning, even though it is known they might not survive.
Flitting through the kitchen in her barely clothed sinewy body, Virginia’s sister-in-law Sheryle, the scrappy beginnings of a tumbleweed, bends to pick up dust no one sees.
Virginia avoids the eyes of the avoiders to watch her mother orchestrating. Mother has become those ants that evade an ant trap, meandering on the kitchen counter, mingling in the fruit bowl. Traipsing in an irrefutable line toward the sugar jar.
Outside somewhere, her father, long dead, that mountain in the distance, prominent from every angle, until an avalanche of infection sheared off the top, without giving anyone much time to run.
Her husband lies silently in the casket, as silent as he was in life, an alpine lake, one she found hiking. He was clear and unexpected, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. No one believed her that the lake existed; they didn’t want to make the hike.
Virginia disintegrates the walls, the family. They fall away with the swiftness of a New Mexico lightening storm. The house is gone, revealing merely the pink sky and her husband, barely visible above the casket edge. Just his nose and one eyebrow.
She inches down a little in her chair and the nose dips behind the horizon of the black casket, leaving only Virginia, an uncharted archipelago floating birdlessly in the kelly-green sea.
Copyright © 2008 by Stefanie Freele
Originally published in Spire and Thema magazines
