Elegy

by steven hopkins

Anthony could hear the coffin from across the room. Silk covered padding, shining wood, brass fixtures. His hands pressed on the pulpit and left patterns in his palms.
He eyed the microphone like a fly on his nose, wings beating like a polygraph. He felt the coffin in his back, leaning on him, making his kidneys ache, pressing him to his knees.
“I didn’t know my brother,” came out.
An audience of three stared at green wallpaper, trying to find the beginning and end of the pattern, noticing that the kid in the coffin’s tie was the same color, trying to remember where they bought their own ties, hoping the potatoes were better this time.
The microphone fluttered. The shoulders of Anthony’s suit puffed like sandbags as he shrugged, and he felt his sleeves run across the scars on his wrists.
“My brother...,” he closed his eyes and shook his head.
The man in the front row held his tie between his fat fingers and hoped Anthony would get done soon.
The funeral director stood up next to Anthony and put his arm on his shoulder as if to say, “Give up young man, you can’t say it, because it isn’t there,” and pulled him away.
But Anthony’s hands gripped tighter like a condemned man refusing to go politely to the chair.
“Look,” he said, and a shriek of feedback struck the air. “He was slow. My brother. Retarded.”
The fat, green man sat blank like a duffle bag.
“But the truth is he was smarter than everybody in this room put together. He stayed next to mom and helped her clean and cook. And the day that she died, you know what he did?”
The two other audience members pulled their eyes from the wallpaper to hear.
“He laid his head on her shoulder and kissed her good-bye. Now, do you all want to know what I did? You want to know? I left. I left my mother dead and my retarded brother crying in her bed. There’s your eulogy. That’s what kind of person my brother was. And now he’s dead and I’m the only one left to tell you three about him.”
Anthony put his hand over the microphone and lowered it, and left the hall rubbing his palms.

As the funeral director closed the coffin, he looked at the young man’s face, and for the first time wondered why he hadn’t kissed his own mother good-bye.