The Day of the Funeral

H er father had been dead for five days. Normally, the funeral would've been earlier, but since he was a victim of a crime, they'd conducted a full autopsy, needing his body for a few extra days. God, his… body . Her father was now a body. It was inside that casket that they'd just lowered into the ground at the cemetery.

Now, people were coming up to her and telling her how sorry they were while her mother sat on the bed in the bedroom, avoiding all company. Eliza had barely made it through the funeral herself, but her mother had collapsed at the church and hadn't even gone to the cemetery. Someone had brought her back to the house, and she hadn't left her room since. That meant that Eliza was the star of this macabre show. She was just a teenager, left on her own to deal with every adult in the house asking how she was, telling her she had their condolences, offering food she didn't want to eat, and saying they'd be there for her. Every adult except for one.

An older man was in the corner of the room, standing next to a woman who was talking to him and eating a carrot. He made eye contact with her for only a second and quickly looked away as if he hadn't meant for Eliza to see him. He had a short, cropped haircut, wore black-rimmed glasses, and was older than her parents by at least a couple of decades, but Eliza couldn't put an exact age range to him. Then again, she also wasn't sure who half of these people were. More than half, really. She suspected they were friends of her father's or both her parents, but she didn't know more than a handful of them. A woman she'd also never met before approached Eliza and stole her attention from the strange man.

"We're so sorry, honey. If there's anything you need, please let us know."

"Thank you," Eliza replied.

She didn't know who the we and us referred to, but she nodded all the same, and the woman walked off, leaving Eliza to sit on the sofa, holding a plastic cup of water and waiting for the next person to inevitably approach and tell her that they were there for her, too. She appreciated it, but all she really wanted was her father. She wanted him to be there for her. She wanted her mother to return to the land of the living, too, because, even though one of her parents was still alive, it felt to Eliza as if she'd lost both of them at once that night. Eliza knew that in time, her mother would return to her old self – or, at least, she hoped for it because she knew she couldn't do this on her own.