Dressed In Black

  Look at her standing there behind his mother, limply shaking hands, stoically holding the gazes of women who weep, baring her lipstick-stained cheeks. She’s a giantess, expanding out into the closed room with that foreign build, the purse that doesn’t match, those clunky shoes that are ten years old if they’re a day. Is there no one to stand beside her and hold that tacky purse, hand her a tissue, tell her which is the great aunt, who the wizened old man is, the one who is shuffling up to his father, what was his name?

There she stands like an old Southern woman, displaced, outdated. Does she not realize that people don’t wear black anymore? She’s just being melodramatic, steeped in hyperbole, determined to step into a place that was never meant for her.

Look at her, standing over the coffin like a buzzard. How is a person to edge over there unnoticed for a peek, to gaze upon his poor lost face one last time?

She had to have him to herself and look what’s happened. He’s gone and there she stands, trying to look forlorn, as if only she could mourn him. He should have known better, but now look where we are, all of us. How dare she?

She stands in the corner, not knowing what to do with her hands, can’t leave her hair alone. She doesn’t know enough to give her arm to his mother, help her up to embrace the old aunt.

She stands wavering, as if some sturdy breeze blowing in from elsewhere were tilting her, tipping her into perpetual imbalance, an ungainly state of asymmetry.

Had she worn white, or a theatrical light fuchsia, she might have managed to seem ethereal, perched on the edge of a cloud. Dressed in black, she is as solid as a rock, yet she totters like a boulder shaken from its purchase on the cliff, suspended a moment before it hurtles tumbling into the surf.

Trifecta week forty-seven

BLACK
3: dressed in black
Including Pearl Jam:

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