Rise
It’s
not as if my aunt and I were ever close, but I believed that at the very least
I should attend her funeral.
I hadn’t visited her house since
we were kids but still, I recognised it as I drove along her street. The white
plastered walls, the little bare gable window, the old slate roof. She’d lived in
this hovel like a hermit in some old fairy story: alone, with hardly any
possessions, and praying to some god or other that I’d never bothered to learn
about.
There was a modest crowd of
people outside the house, spilling into the road. I pulled up at the kerb three
doors down, locked my car, and walked the rest of the way.
A young man with spiky hair and
a lazy eye grabbed my arm. “Are you here for the viewing?”
“The viewing?”
“Agatha’s body? The viewing of
her body.”
Suddenly I understood. Of course,
she’d be lying in state, in the old-fashioned way. Awaiting the adoration of
her mourners.
“Yes. She’s – she was my
aunt.”
The young man nodded. His smile
was radiant. I guessed that he was a member of the same congregation as Aunt
Agatha. The Obscure Church of Somethingorother, as my mother used to
call it.
“It won’t be long now,” said a
woman holding a curiously silent baby to her breast. “Just a few minutes.”
I was about to ask her what she
meant when the crowd fell silent. All the air seemed to be sucked out of the
vicinity, creating a vacuum. I felt a strange pulsing sensation in my left
temple, and then a vast emptiness within my head. For a moment, I smelled juniper
berries, but the scent was fleeting.
The eyes of the people around me
shone with something I didn’t recognise, a gleam of mania that made me feel
uncomfortable.
“Here she is,” someone
whispered, breaking the spell. As one, they raised their eyes and looked to the
sky, and then they all began to chant. Low, wordless, more of a humming sound
that anything verbalised.
As I followed their gaze,
looking up at the low roof and its cracked shingles, the indistinct figure of my
aunt rose slowly skyward from some point directly behind the building. I knew
it was her. It couldn’t have been anyone else. She looked relaxed, as if she
were simply resting, with her arms held aloft in a pose that suggested supplication.
She hovered in place for several
moments, motionless above the roof of her grubby little house, and then, entirely
without warning, she rose briskly into the sky, picking up speed until she was
nothing but a speck, and then nothing, against the high, wispy white clouds.
After a polite pause, the crowd
began to applaud. But the applause was subdued, polite even, as if they were
wary of making too much of a racket.
Not long after that, the crowd
began to disperse. It didn’t take long; there were not that many of them.
I waited there, confused by what I’d just seen.
I thought that if I waited long enough, and thought hard enough, at some point
it might begin to make sense.
It didn’t. It still doesn’t. I
suppose it never will.
© Gary
McMahon,
September 2025