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He wanted to be buried, but they would dissolve him by alkaline hydrolysis. It was the kindest thing to do, nullifying his years of crawling through traffic in an SUV, sneaking biodegradables in with the inorganic collection, buying clingfilmed vegetables, and pouring pesticides on his tomato plants. It was the green option. Animals at the freezing works would be water-blasted until the last obdurate glues and sinews slipped from the skeletons. This was something like that, but with water and lye and a warm oven. Three hours of regression into a brown liquid by-product and calcium phosphate. The chemicals from which we came.
They met in the conference room. Four stackable polypropylene chairs arranged in a trapezoid. They decided to webcast the funeral. A Skype session with the Aussie progeny. The cousins could kick back with Doritos and caramel corn and watch the spectacle from beanbags. It would be the sort of performance that could take place on a split screen, or a reduced tab, while its viewers YouTubed videos of corgis walking backwards, or how to polish a fossilised turd, or the twelve best proteins for vegetarians who like soft-core porn. They would keep the eulogist on a six-minute timeframe; there would be a Sioux Indian Committal; sandwiches would be egg and ham or jellied asparagus.
There was a time Jim dreamed of being someone named on an obelisk. He missed the war. His window-cleaning business miscarried, along with his marriage. His Bible always fell open to the sour milk smells of Deuteronomy. But his favourite was Ephesians 4:2. He used to skip stones for his three children. They would collect flat pebbles in their cardigans, and he would show them the best and gently demonstrate the curl of his wrist. The black-back gulls would hiccup and yowl. The boats would clap against their moorings. He would scrape the piddocks from his buoy and show the children the kindest way to kill a piper fish. Look it in the eyeball. Some days they would eat tomatoes from the truss or in the back seat of his SUV where they’d hide the pithy cores in his seat pockets. They would drive through the slut of suburbs, past Tip Top dairies and milliners and barbershops. Gracie Fields would sing ‘Love is Everywhere’ from the cassette player, and Jim’s hands would shake against the steering wheel, and he would wipe the damp from his lashes, and the ocean would disappear in the rear-vision mirror, backing away, like everything he coveted.
When they sold the SUV, the car-dealer found a wizened tomato in the glovebox. Mummified like a cat, he said to the car-groomer at Smoko, and they laughed and dragged on their cigarettes under the sharpening sky.
From Flock 20.
He wanted to be buried, but they would dissolve him by alkaline hydrolysis. It was the kindest thing to do, nullifying his years of crawling through traffic in an SUV, sneaking biodegradables in with the inorganic collection, buying clingfilmed vegetables, and pouring pesticides on his tomato plants. It was the green option. Animals at the freezing works would be water-blasted until the last obdurate glues and sinews slipped from the skeletons. This was something like that, but with water and lye and a warm oven. Three hours of regression into a brown liquid by-product and calcium phosphate. The chemicals from which we came.
They met in the conference room. Four stackable polypropylene chairs arranged in a trapezoid. They decided to webcast the funeral. A Skype session with the Aussie progeny. The cousins could kick back with Doritos and caramel corn and watch the spectacle from beanbags. It would be the sort of performance that could take place on a split screen, or a reduced tab, while its viewers YouTubed videos of corgis walking backwards, or how to polish a fossilised turd, or the twelve best proteins for vegetarians who like soft-core porn. They would keep the eulogist on a six-minute timeframe; there would be a Sioux Indian Committal; sandwiches would be egg and ham or jellied asparagus.
There was a time Jim dreamed of being someone named on an obelisk. He missed the war. His window-cleaning business miscarried, along with his marriage. His Bible always fell open to the sour milk smells of Deuteronomy. But his favourite was Ephesians 4:2. He used to skip stones for his three children. They would collect flat pebbles in their cardigans, and he would show them the best and gently demonstrate the curl of his wrist. The black-back gulls would hiccup and yowl. The boats would clap against their moorings. He would scrape the piddocks from his buoy and show the children the kindest way to kill a piper fish. Look it in the eyeball. Some days they would eat tomatoes from the truss or in the back seat of his SUV where they’d hide the pithy cores in his seat pockets. They would drive through the slut of suburbs, past Tip Top dairies and milliners and barbershops. Gracie Fields would sing ‘Love is Everywhere’ from the cassette player, and Jim’s hands would shake against the steering wheel, and he would wipe the damp from his lashes, and the ocean would disappear in the rear-vision mirror, backing away, like everything he coveted.
When they sold the SUV, the car-dealer found a wizened tomato in the glovebox. Mummified like a cat, he said to the car-groomer at Smoko, and they laughed and dragged on their cigarettes under the sharpening sky.
From Flock 20.
![[Photo] Elizabeth Morton](https://flocklit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/headshot-5-300x284.jpeg)
Elizabeth Morton is a writer from New Zealand. She is published in Poetry NZ, Narrative Magazine, Hermeneutic Chaos, PRISM International, Atlas Journal, Cordite, Island Magazine, and The Moth, amongst others. She is included in Best Small Fictions 2016, and came second, twice, in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story competition. Her first poetry collection, Wolf, is published with Mākaro Press (2017). She likes to write about broken things and things with teeth.