I dreamed I attended my father's funeral. Two rows of pews filled the sanctuary, aisle splitting the middle, and my wife and I sat on the right front row. The preacher carried in a plain wooden bench and set it before the pew to our left, and he whipped my father's body right out of the polished cherry coffin. He set the body on the bench and it slumped, doughy head flopped to the side, face blank with bloat. The minister preached something that must have involved elasticity and futility. He had the bearing of an older man, the brimstone-spreading saints that haunt any given countryside altar, but his message left breathing room. My father wasn't there. None of us were.

But there my father was, too, sitting right in front of the demonstration. He wore a serious look I've seen many times. It presaged beltings, slurs, accusations, orders. My mother bent on her knees beside him, weeping and wailing, and my father watched, lips curled to one side and brow furrowed, head tilted forward, studying through his gold-framed glasses. He didn't like what he saw.

I'd like to say I comforted him, had some words for him, but I didn't. When the preacher finally gave up the ghost, returned my father's body to the coffin, we stood to face the benediction. Now we lay us down to sleep, he prayed, and then we filed to the parking lot. My father and mother climbed into the low, long black Cadillac with the body and the preacher. They didn't look back at me. We joined the slender line of mourning to the cemetery where the sun rose, forgiving and dismissing of all we brought with us, and did it all over again.

Marvin Shackelford's book of stories, TALL TALES FROM THE LADIES' AUXILLARY, is forthcoming from Alternating Current. He lives in Tennessee.

Detail of collage on main page courtesy of Joana Coccarelli.

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