When I first saw him, I thought that perhaps he was sleeping. Then the light shifted, and it seemed his whole body transformed into something rough chiseled from stone, heavy and impenetrable. When I moved closer, he was instead a porcelain doll sheathed in an eggshell skin, too still and flawless to be real. But in fact, he was none of those things. He was just dead.
He was the boyfriend of my best friend at the time, a rough girl sprouting a mohawk and steel-trap eyelashes who wore high-heels and a low-cut dress to his wake, one that broadcast the badly-rendered Grim Reaper tattoo glowering on her shoulder. Throngs of kids, all resembling poor knock-offs of punk rock clichés, clenched tightly around her in the funeral parlor atrium, anointing her grieving widow shtick with dueling streams of Wet ‘n’ Wild kohl. Looking past the tears and into her eyes I could see how she loved it, their attention filling the cavernous want forged by a family chronicle of emotional remoteness. I watched as their fawning hands flew around her body, massaging the pain, milking out more tears, bigger tears. I instinctively knew that our friendship was over.
The dead boyfriend’s middle name was Blue, but he wasn’t what you’d call introspective or melancholy. In life he was red fire edged with black smoke tearing through our town, reckless with 17 years worth of callous indifference. He was not my friend, he barely acknowledged my existence. I was just another unfortunate amendment to the girl he wanted to fuck, and he tolerated me at best. He died after being hit by a train while playing chicken late one night, drunk on liquor siphoned from his parents’ bar. When I heard that he was dead I felt absolutely nothing.
Yet I stood alone by his casket that day, feeling like I should do or say something meaningful. Now that he was dead I wanted to look at him and see something besides a dumb kid who’d drank too much one night and made a mistake that killed him. I wanted to confer redemption on him somehow. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. When I looked into his face all I could see was the hint of a bruise on his cheek rising through the layers of cadaver makeup, a dark flower that bloomed in his body on impact, poorly concealed evidence of the raging, foolish boy who now, suddenly, wasn’t there.
