An Unlikely Crucifixion
by Gabriel Moseley
aybe this funeral director directed funerals as a kid, placing shiny pennies on the unblinking eyes of his sister’s dolls and burying them with great solemnity in muddy graves before advancing on to softer, once-living things. A fly in a match box. A mummified frog. A worm crucifixion. Maybe he gave soaring elegies to his pale beloved goldfish, lamenting the inevitable way our iridescence fades, before the ceremonial pouring of the dead into the jaws of the bright white toilet bowl. Maybe, bored of waiting, he gave death a helping hand, trickling Dad’s whiskey into Mr. Wrinkles’ water dropper, crossing the stiff, pink, padded mouse feet across its soft, still chest and sailing the tiny Viking ship, blazing, across the dark mirror of the lake. Maybe he built a gristly seaside coliseum—five crabs enter, no crab leaves. Maybe this funeral director just wakes most nights with the weight of a pyramid on his chest, listening to the teeth in his garden rising like flowers in the rain, staring up at the blank ceiling of his lonely house, afraid of what comes next.
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Author's Note
This story began from rage. More specifically, from my rage at the blatant profiteering of the death industry, which I encountered when my family and I made the funeral arrangements for my grandmother. The upselling of coffins was a big one—as if, somehow, a fancier coffin would guarantee a more luxurious afterlife. My first attempts to write about this experience were more direct and didn’t quite work. To entertain myself, I began to imagine alternatives. I pictured a funeral director haunted by death, even as a child, obsessed with trying to understand and perform all the strange rituals we’ve invented to honor the dead. When I laughed out loud at the phrase “worm crucifixion,” I knew I was on the right track.
There’s one image that was lost, though, when the story shifted to what it is now—a simple, sincere thing. As my grandmother’s funeral procession drove through town, a man on a hill—a complete stranger—took off his hat, held it over his heart, and bowed his head. I think of this man and this moment often.
Gabriel Moseley is a writer from Seattle, Washington. His short story “A Man Stands Tall” was awarded The Masters Review Anthology Prize, selected by Roxane Gay. He received the General Motors’ Future Fiction Scholarship to attend Aspen Summer Words and was named as a finalist for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and as a semi-finalist for L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work appears in CRAFT Literary Magazine, The Masters Review, Night Shades Magazine, and Book XI. https://www.gabrielmoseley.com
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