FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #7

She's a local. Or at least she was.

They found her sitting near her camper by the dry creek bed up by the Meijer, wearing a Miami hat and typical old lady clothes. No one could remember her name, though she had been around forever, and her camper didn't have any plates to run. Her camper didn’t have much of anything, come to think of it, save for some bare cupboards and the furniture that was bolted to it.

It did have a will, though I don’t know if you could call it that. In any case, there was no name on it, either. There were only three points:

Number One – To be disposed of with a Tibetan sky burial

 

Now, no one knew what that was, but Ed McCayhee had talked to his brother for the first time in years only a couple a days earlier and found out that he had moved on from Mongolia to Tibet to study as a Yogi, if you can believe that. If you can’t, you should probably stop reading while you’re ahead. Long story short, they got in touch again and ten days later Ed’s brother Chuck was back in town looking like he had just been hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Like I said, no one knew what a sky burial was except for Chuck, but you know how rumor gets around in our kind of towns. I must have been the only one who looked it up on Wikipedia and I sure didn’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone. Most of the town ladies thought it had something or other to do with a hot air balloon, but they were so far off it wasn’t even funny. Curiosity kept building and people started inviting their relatives and making a show out of it, placing advance orders at KFC for picnics and all, and next thing anybody knew it was the event of the season. My old high school offered the use of their football field and I had to bite my tongue so hard it almost fell off. I started to feel a bit bad about what was coming, but I had to see it for myself.

Chuck was always a bit of a sick such-and-such, but you should have seen the smile on his face when he was carving that body up. He told his brother he needed a tarp for the ordeal, and then they set the thing up right in the middle of the gridiron like they planned. By the time he was already in the thick of it, everyone was too shocked to stop him or really do much of anything except watch, and Chuck butchered her just like she wanted, and he kept wiping his beard with the back of his arm and getting more blood in it, looking the whole time like he was about to bust up laughing.

In not too long at all he had the Local in pieces, and then he stepped back and let the birds do their thing. Seemed like the birds didn’t know what was going on, either, but they got going in time while the principal and a couple of other guys pulled Chuck aside and treated him like Jack Kevorkian. A couple more came to his defense and one of them knocked Mike Lodi on his ass, and next thing you knew there was a brawl going on. Only then did the kids start making a noise, and the mothers started pulling them out of there left and right. A couple cops showed up later but no one got arrested, or at least I don’t think so. I was busy watching the birds.

Next day was Sunday, and I’ve never seen such a big elephant in the room. Father Earl (that’s John Earl, no disrespect) tip-toed around the subject his whole sermon, making all these weird half-comments that died on the spot. When it came to a close, one of the real “upstanding” mothers of the community made a beeline right for the altar and she must have gotten three words out of her mouth before the priest shook his head, said “I don’t know,” and walked away.

Right after church I went down to Ed’s house to have a drink with him and his brother together for the first time since high school. I should have expected to find at least twenty other people there, and so we all invaded one of the old dive bars down town where we wouldn’t be too bothered. Chuck barely got on the stool before someone started in with the questioning, and he hadn’t even gotten his beer yet. So he let the debate go around for a while, neither able to get a word in edgewise nor attempting to do so, until he broke the rabble himself.

“Terry,” he said to me, “when you die, would you rather your kids drop a few grand on your casket and a plot, or would you rather provide some nourishment for the fauna?”

“Costs more than a few grand nowadays,” someone said, and someone else agreed.

“Provide some nourishment for the fauna,” I said, and we got our beers just then and tapped our bottles, drank at least a half a dozen each, and that was that.

 

Number Two – Give the home to Boston

 

That may sound a little strange if you didn’t know that Boston is our local retard. After his parents died in the 80s, some scumbag took advantage of him and screwed Boston out of his parents’ house. Ever since he had been living in an otherwise abandoned shed up in the hills, though he spent most of the day in town panhandling and eating at the soup kitchen.

All of a sudden, all the people who got their skivvies in knots over the sky burial were gung ho on cleaning out the camper for Boston and reupholstering it and whatnot, but the pro-sky burial people didn’t let them have it that easy. The resulting pissing contest was almost as much of a spectacle as the burial itself, any when it was all said and done the camper had a new paint job, new upholstery, appliances, a flat-screen TV and more canned goods in the cupboards than I have ever seen from a food drive before, not to mention a plot to legally park the camper which included a freshly planted vegetable garden. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen a retard cry, and I’m glad I saw it.

Number Three – Drink until All is Well

 

That was the easy one. But a funny thing happened, and I don’t know if it was the July heat wave or just the tone of the town that particular weekend, but one afternoon I was skunk as a drunk and walked down to the liquor store and saw a couple of other guys heading the same way. I caught up with one of them, and without missing a beat he said “Taking the Local’s advice?” and I just smiled. We shot the breeze for a while and even passed a cop, but just about everyone I saw that day was drunk. I wouldn’t rule the cop out, either. It was a brotherly drunk, though, not the mean drunk I was used to, and it completely threw me off guard in a good way. We spent the rest of the day bumming around the neighborhood and even ran into the priest, who had also appeared to have taken the Local’s advice.

I really don’t know why I’m telling you any of this, but that was six years ago. We’ve been holding Local’s Days ever since, right where her camper used to be parked. Dads haul their grills out while the kids screw around in the creek bed, and then everyone shares their food with everyone, the other homeless included, and at the end there are more than a few of us who leave some leftovers out for the birds. Ed once told me “I think she would want it this way,” but Ed’s always been full of it. I just do it to do it, and who knows what she wanted. We don’t even know her name—we only know that she was a local.

back to Contest #7