We Gather Here Today

Listen (8 min) | Short story | Dark comedy | Mild language

Angie hated herself for wearing the blazer. Early May in her native Wisconsin was still jacket weather, but Oklahoma hadn’t gotten the memo.

She could feel the sweat soaking her blouse. The sunburn blossoming on her forehead.

Just get through the service.

A small one, thank god—two mourners and Kevin Barner, an officiant whose unreliability was legendary.

She worried when he was fifteen minutes late. The discomfort of that quarter hour—no moving air, no water, no sound but the clearing of throats—was inflamed by her fear that he might never appear. But he made it, giggling and apologizing as he scurried up to the graveside and began the ceremony.

Angie wouldn’t have been there at all if her employer hadn’t double-booked. Rookies covered for the boss, so she was the one to fill in and direct the company’s cheapest eco-friendly funeral on a ninety-five-degree day. She tried fanning herself with her phone, hoping the deceased wouldn’t leak through his wicker casket.

Barner paused.

He was pale, sweating, taking deep breaths. “We gather today to say goodbye to . . . .” Blinking, he repeated himself, not getting any further.

Fumbling with the papers in his hand, he squinted down at them. Hissing in a stage whisper, he addressed himself to the mourner nearest him, pointing at the paper and asking if the young man could read his handwriting. No luck.

She smirked, happy for the absence of any family. They’d arranged everything with her boss from a European vacation. They wouldn’t care if a strange officiant forgot their father’s—uncle’s? brother’s?—name. And Angie couldn’t help. She didn’t know it either. All the paperwork was back at the office.

Barner paused, leaning on the mourner, wiping his brow and belching.

Food poisoning. It had to be.

The officiant’s legs wobbled, stumbling towards the grave and giving out. He was on his knees, clutching the wooden supports that held the casket above its final resting place.

Staring nowhere, he raised his eyebrows, and pressing his face between basket and earth, Barner vomited into the empty grave.

Drunk. The smell confirmed it.

Angie ripped off the blazer and used it to wipe the sweat from her face. She wondered if her boss really had double-booked herself.

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Monica Louise Ipshin, a morally upstanding individual, cared about her tenants. Like family. But a busy woman like her could lose track of time, of papers and requests. She did everything—absolutely everything she could to make the apartment more home than house. And all alone.

Naturally, some items fell through the cracks. John—or Ron? Don?—had put in a request to fix the leaky plumbing a month or two ago. Three at most. Shortage of plumbers and excess of work meant scheduling and paying far in advance. It’d be easier and cheaper to get someone in summer, so she put the request in the summer pile.

The elderly tenant lived on his own. A tragic figure of America’s forgotten generation. Anyone with half-decent eyesight would’ve seen the puddle forming on the kitchen floor, and she couldn’t turn the building into a nursing home. Living alone meant accepting risk.

She looked around at the others, wondering which was family. No one was being emotional, but at such times people could be petty. Even money hungry.

Lawsuits. Bankruptcy. What if they came after her for everything?

Maybe the old man’s request had gotten lost in the pile. Maybe she’d never gotten one at all.

The minister stopped talking. She could see how he felt the heat. They all did.

Fluffing a tissue, she dabbed her forehead and eyes, hoping they saw her, in the blazing heat, at her friend’s graveside, weak with sorrow and exhaus—

Hlechhhhhhhhh!

Monica covered her mouth and nose, trying not to smell the puke.

A drunken minister. So disrespectful.

The man next to her had to be a grandson. Squeezing his arm, she forced a tear, making eye contact and tisking as she shook her head at the spectacle.

---

In spite of the badge that came standard with the company uniform, Jackson didn’t know the name of the man in the casket. He’d seen him at the superstore where they both worked, wearing his blue vest and greeting customers as they entered. They’d said hello to each other, a couple of good mornings and good nights.

When Jackson became a shift leader, he decided not to rely on the tags. He wanted to get to know the employees reporting to him, but sometime between the third and fourth month in, he lost track. The man in the casket came at the end of his first year. Jackson interviewed him.

When the death was reported to his place of employment, the store manager invited Jackson into his office. The company put up with a lot of bad press due to low wages, and wouldn’t it be great—the manager said—if they could do their part to show a little humanity, to convince people that they cared for their employees. Hell, they’d even donate the casket, and there were some nice wicker ones in overstock.

Jackson had written a piece for the store blog on the celebration of a former employee’s one hundredth birthday. He would attend the funeral, represent the company, write a new piece, and tug a few heartstrings.

Yearly raises were coming up, and fifteen dollars an hour didn’t leave a lot after expenses to pay one’s student loans.

Jackson glanced around at his fellow mourners. The simplicity of the service could be played up—maybe the eco conscious aspect—but a funeral attended by four people, not counting the grave diggers and the corpse, didn’t encourage anything warm. The former superstore employee would be laid to rest, and by the looks on the faces standing around the grave, no one would remember to think of him.

A theme suggested itself to Jackson: something about the tragedy of a life gobbled up by a machine corporation as fuel for its never-ending stranglehold on the local economy. It pressed on his head, weighing itself against a pile of debt and twenty dollars an hour.

The officiant was having trouble with his notes. Jackson related it to the smell of whiskey seeping from his pores. The man held on to him, asking if he could make out the deceased’s name in scrawl on the sweat-soaked paper. Jackson could not.

Stumbling, the officiant put the cherry on the sundae and vomited into the open grave.

The woman next to him fixed a tragic, shocked mask on her features.

Jackson had to find another job.

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The first draft of this story was written in 2023 and has lain unseen on my laptop until now. I thought it would be fun to revisit it, especially since I don’t write much comedy.

Photo by Ivan Samkov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-standing-on-the-green-grass-near-a-marble-stone-with-flowers-8963957/