Dangling Feet

If this was ancient Rome, this would be a buried volcanic-ash death. Eveline and I. In our own little Pompeii. This could be how we died.

Photo by David Romualdo on Unsplash

A SHORT STORY

Where I am now is the Bury & Sons Funeral Home backroom.

Celebrating life with dignity. From home to Heaven in first class.

At least, that’s what they say on their billboard advert.

The two men standing by my uncle are Blue and Mint. Blue’s got a roll tape measure in his hand. For the third time, he rolls it from my uncle’s head down to his feet. Then he strokes his beard. Humming stuck on a vowel. Mint’s scratching what’s left of his hair on his bald head. He starts humming too.

“Nope, this won’t fit,” Blue’s saying. Looking at Mint, pointing at my uncle.

My uncle Larry is lying on one of those hospital gurneys. The one with tiny wheels you can use to thrust the A&E ward door open in a life-or-death emergency. Except this is not the A&E, this is a funeral home backroom.

There’s no emergency here. No heart attack. No profuse bleeding. My uncle, he’s already dead.

What they’re trying to understand is how my uncle’s dead body can’t fit in the wooden pine coffin they’ve put together. And I’m here because I’m trying to figure this out too.

“We must have measured the wrong leg,” Blue says.

The leg Blue’s referring to is the one my uncle doesn’t have. The one the doctor took care of years ago.

When diabetes clogs your arteries and veins, it can just pop anywhere. Anywhere being your beaded manicured fingers. Anywhere being your muscled marathon-runner calf. Your feet. Your toes. Diabetes doesn’t care much about how you make money to pay your mortgage. It just sits somewhere, anywhere in your body. And boom, your blood’s stuck. It strikes any limb until it gets that blueberry-bruised colour. After that, it’s all a hundred shades of dark. The way you know your skin is dying. The way you know you’ll lose a limb soon.

The doctor who looked after uncle dealt with it the way you deal with a jutting piece of wool hanging off a jumper.

You chop it off. Amputated.

A sharp tool can get rid of anything. We cut twenty-four-carat diamonds. Limbs and bones just rip like breadsticks.

Before getting into the surgery room he said, everything’s gonna be alright. As if losing a leg you could save is still alright. When uncle woke up he could still feel it. His leg. His toes. He tried to lift it beneath the bed sheet. Although there wasn’t much to move any more by then.

Ghost leg. That’s how they call it.

You’ve got something attached to your body for so long that even when it’s gone you believe it’s still there. The way your mind tricks you is not only about ex-wives or taxes you thought you already paid. That goes for your missing limbs too.

Looking at my uncle’s missing leg, Blue lights up a cigarette. A few drags and some of the ash drops on the floor. All the rest trickles on my uncle’s double-breasted suit.

You won’t believe how hard it is to get a rented suit for a dead person. Purchase a brand new one and that will cost you half of your wage. Weddings and funerals move the world economy. Celebration. After mourn. After celebration. And so on.

The seesaw of life.

“Ya see, this side fits,” says Mint. I say, yeah, he’s got no leg there.

Mint says, oh.

Blue says, ew.

I brought a deck of cards with me. I wanted uncle to take it with him. Wherever he’s going now. The deck is brand new, still wrapped in shining, clear cellophane plastic. The same stuff they put on those cigarettes you shouldn’t smoke. Same one on the condom packs you never buy. Cellophane plastic’s everywhere. The world still hasn’t figured out how to recycle it just yet.

I know uncle loathed it. A brand new shining deck of cards is the worst, he used to say. All that laminated film makes them slippery, you have no grip. And to do a card trick, one thing you need is some grip. Some good old dirty card stickiness.

When I was a kid uncle always said, there’s nothing a magic trick can’t fix. That goes for the lover you want to impress. That also goes for the whining kid you want to shut up.

It goes for nearly everything.

“Does it go for young nephews too?” I asked.

He ruffled my hair and said no. With a young nephew you simply teach them the trick, then they do the rest, all by themselves.

That’s one of those traditions you pass on. Generation after generation. The way how you try not to piss on the lid. That makes moms furious. Generations of men know trying to get it right. And pass it along. From father to son, all the way down the genealogical tree.

Father-to-child traditions.

How to put condoms on, that, kids have to figure out for themselves. And if they don’t, it’s just another premature generation to be fed with card tricks.

Uncle Larry taught me magic tricks, although he wasn’t a professional magician. The one who makes a woman disappear in a steel framed box on stage. Uncle Larry was not one of them.

However, once he tried to make auntie disappear over breakfast. Between a poached egg and a cup of black coffee. By the time he was done with the trick, auntie had packed all her stuff and walked away shutting the front door. Gone.

Uncle always said that was the best trick of his life. But nobody was there to watch. Not a single hand clap. Forty years auntie was gone and she never came back.

That’s why I’m not a real magician, Uncle said. “Magicians, they always bring their partner back.”

Here at the Bury & Sons Funeral Home backroom, Blue and Mint are saying that it’s worth a shot. The shot is trying to fit Uncle Larry in that forever-sleeping wooden cot.

They slide the gurney by the coffin side.

“Three, two, one,” they’re both counting down.

One clutching Uncle from his armpit, the other holding the good leg and what’s left of the other. They lift him up and over. And voilá, Uncle is in the coffin. Or at least most of him. Blue grabs Uncle’s arms and crosses them x-shape at his abdomen. “Not sure why, but we do that,” he says, still looking at him.

And then Uncle’s arms start gently sliding down his sides. Gravity makes fun of you also when you are dead.

“Pass me that ponytail tie down there,” Mint says. And he ties Uncle’s thumbs together.

“You’re lucky he’s keeping his eyes shut,” Blue says. “When they don’t, we have to glue their eyelids. You’re a lucky kid.”

Uncle would have loathed that. He hated anything creamy on his body. Imagine having glue all over his eyes for the rest of his underground-life.

Eyes shut and thumbs fixed, Uncle’s no longer moving. As far as a dead body can move. I think that it looks perfect for passing away. If it wasn’t for his foot dangling off the bottom of the coffin.

Dangling.

The way you dangle it while you’re taking your aromatic-salts evening bath. Those stupid bathtubs are always too short.

Elf-shaped.

Making your body feel a gazillion times bigger than what it is. Whoever designed them, they didn’t count on the upcoming taller generation of bathers. That’s how you end up knees bent over your chest in the bathtub. Feeling claustrophobic and blowing foam all over the bathroom. That usually just works on adverts.

Your wrinkled balls floating up to the top. Your no longer perky tits cresting on top like two dangling buoys. That’s the Archimedes’s Principle they don’t show on tv.

Fighting in your bathtub against physics is a losing battle. So you just drain the whole water down and take a shower in despair.

Uncle Larry would have come up with one of his magic tricks to solve this dangling mess. He used to say, magic is all about shifting the focus.

Work your presentation.

Surprise them.

That’s real magic.

And your audience will gasp.

That also worked the day I burned down half of my backyard. When my girlfriend locked herself in the house and left me outside.

“Cool your dick-head down,” Eveline yelled from behind the double-glass door. She also added a bunch of other pull-yourself-together and I-had-enough-of-this stuff, which I couldn’t hear. Lip-reading some life or death messages coming from the person you just had sex with. Me, scratching the door like an abandoned pet.

So I pulled together a couple of logs and a bunch of newspaper. I piled them up and poured some liquor on it. It cries my heart off to waste liquor this way but hey, you’d do anything to present a pretty good magic trick.

With all this wood and papers piled up and my cigarette lighter, there’s fire.

I’m Neanderthal great grand-million-times-son again.

On the newspaper, articles of blown-up bombs in countries I can’t even pronounce. Stock market titles plummeting and political scandals. Floods, cataclysms and royal gossip.

Newspapers start burning, and so do the logs. The whole world burning on the lawn of my backyard.

Shift the focus.

The fire takes and grows. There’s smoke gusting all above my head.

I see Eveline standing by the door. She’s waving her hands in the air. And then her pink wool blues is the only thing I see of her, behind the whirling spiral of smoke. Floating by the door. Wrapping the house in an intoxicating carbon dioxide hug. It’s smoke all over now.

That’s when she throws the door open and walks over to me with heavy steps. That’s how killers must walk when they point at their victim. The victim here being me.

She’s asking if I’m insane. And when I say asking, I mean she’s screaming it.

Her neck swelled purple-red. Over the burning crackling sput-sput of the fire. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she’s screaming. And I guess that’s a rhetorical question.

She walks past me, to my little backyard inferno. She’s looking for a way to extinguish the fire. For me, I just need a couple of minutes to do what I want to do.

Work your presentation.

Eveline, she’s standing by the fire. Her sweater will smell of burned dead fur and smoked newspaper for weeks. That’s quite a pyrotechnic trick presentation right there.

She’s gazing at our backyard trees fading behind the growing smoke. Then she spins on her foot and looks at me.

Surprise them.

And there I am. One knee down, with one hand I’m holding this velvet-folded box.

I hope she’s appreciating the natural-smoke gun I put on. This is all true bio-natural stuff. This is vegan, I think. With a sense of relief.

I think it’s vegan and I’m crying. With the smoke smoking shit in your eyes, you can’t even keep them open.

And there I am. Kneeling down, eyes shut and crying. Tears shedding over my cheeks and I’m blind. Squinting. Trying to look at her pink blues across this artificial fog.

Eveline’s frowning. Not sure how people react to a wedding proposal, but she’s frowning with a loose jaw. Looking at me.

Me, eyes shut and my knee getting soaked in the muddy loam. The fire growing behind her. From far away, some music jam of giggling sirens on the road. Someone called the firefighters. Ruining my majestic proposal plan.

My girlfriend, Eveline, the woman I’m asking to marry me, she’s crying. If it wasn’t for the giant mass of smoke we’re wrapped in, I’d think that’s even romantic.

She’s crying so much she keeps one arm folded over her mouth. Drying tears off her eyes.

“Can’t see shit,” she says.

I say, usually the answer shifts between yes or no, and everything in between.

“But I guess we can be flexible,” I say.

The firefighters break in the garden fence, unrolling miles of water pipe from their truck.

That’s the real magic.

It’s a smoke bubble all around us. I’m here doing my magic trick.

She says, “Yes, you idiot.”

When the firefighters get rid of the pile of smoke, we’re hugging. Both on our knees. If this was ancient Rome, this would be a buried volcanic-ash death. Eveline and I. In our own little Pompeii. This could be how we died. But this is just how she decided to marry me.

And your audience will gasp.

Uncle Larry said that was the most idiotic romantic shit he’d ever heard. That somehow made me feel proud.

Back to the Bury & Sons Funeral Home backroom. We’re still here. One massive iceberg chunk probably just broke off in the Antarctic water. Splash. The ocean level just rose imperceptibly. And my uncle’s foot’s still dangling off this coffin.

Mint’s having a snack. Standing by my uncle. One of those sugar-free snack bars. Some of those crumbled dates and cereals drop over my uncle’s crotch.

He says, sorry.

Stooping over to dust it off, more crumbs pouring over my uncle’s chest. Over his face. Over his double-breasted suit jacket.

I’m thinking that when I die I want to be cremated.

Dust to dust.

Looking at Blue spreading his mid-afternoon snack over my uncle the only thought that hits me is rigor mortis.

When your body is depleted of oxygen after death and muscles die stiff. And you die with an inflexible elbow. A bended knee. Or if you’re unlucky enough, you pass away with a forever-lasting boner under your pants.

Blue is scratching his long beard and Mint’s just finished his sugar-free cereal bar.

The funeral started half an hour ago. There’ll be people murmuring, wondering where the coffin is. Where my uncle is.

That’s when I pull out the deck of cards and open them. Touching them. Bending them all, just a bit. Leaving little particles of me on it. My fingerprints on every single card.

If Uncle is going to use them, I don’t want the cards to slip on his hands and him looking like an idiot. For now, that’s the best I can do.

When I’m done I put the deck of cards in Uncle’s top jacket pocket.

“Ya better leave him some change too,” Blue says.

“Ain’t easy gambling up there,” Mint says.

Shift the focus.

Then I take Uncle’s eyeglasses I brought with me. The ones he used because ageing is not only hundreds of wrinkles and erection always pointing south. You lose sight too. And Uncle did.

I clean the glasses on my shirt. Through them, Mint’s face distorted in a bubbled eye and a lump on his cheek. Through these glasses we all look modern Quasimodo.

I put them on Uncle’s shut eyes.

“Ain’t gonna need much of ’em either,” Mint says.

“D’ya think he ain’t gonna recognise God?” Blue says.

They’re both giggling.

I say, I want Uncle Larry to see this very last magic trick.

At the far corner of the room, there’s a bed sheet. I grab it, then I nudge Blue, who stumbles back a few steps. Mint moves back without me asking him anything.

And I kiss uncle’s forehead. Frozen. Marble frozen. You don’t realise how your beating heart warms you up until it stops. I whisper, I hope you like this.

Mint’s trying to catch some dry snot up his nose.

“Ya what?” Blue says.

Work your presentation.

And then I throw the sheet, blowing up in the air, still holding one side. The way your granny used to set up the family lunch table. The way wind blows sails on a boat.

It falls down gently on the coffin. Uncle still in it. His foot still dangling off the edge.

I say, this is a trick they probably have never seen before.

Mint looks at Blue, who looks at Mint. And then they both look at me.

I say, I don’t like countdowns. Time’s been up for a while. At least for most of us.

I clutch the sheet with both my hand. And I shut my eyes.

I hope you’re proud of me, I say.

That’s real magic.

I pull the sheet. Floating up in the air for an instant. In front of Mint’s face. In front of Blue’s face. I drag the sheet down and let it dead-leaf flying on the floor.

Mint drops the finger off his nose. He’s looking at Blue looking at Mint looking at him. Then they both look in front of them. The invisible ping-pong match of life. No ball needed.

And your audience will gasp.

They look at me, looking at the coffin. Both eyes are rounded and wide. Dilated. Like a Christmas morning with a present-less Christmas tree.

Empty. The coffin still there. But empty.

Uncle Larry’s dead.

Uncle Larry. Now. Is gone.

Uncle Larry always said that there’s nothing a magic trick can’t fix. Those memories you create for people to remember and believe in.

Those memories are your little way of lasting forever in this world.

Feeling immortal.

Because it’s all about shifting the focus. Work your presentation. Surprise them.

That’s real magic.

And your audience will gasp.