Mara Kesh took a deep breath. She could feel the euphoria threatening to over take her, but she fought it down. She sat in her black pant suit and struggled to stay still. The laughter caught in her throat and she dabbed at her eyes to mask her joy as sorrow. People came and talked at her. She nodded bleakly and accepted their words. Some she even allowed to embrace her. Mara fought to remain numb. Fought to hide the exhiliration she felt inside.
A slash of light fell across the casket as the sun began to set. The sun’s rays moved across the walls and somehow Mara remained still. She kept her dancing feet trapped inside her sensible shoes. The last mourner came and went and finally she was alone in the immense room.
Tissues littered the tables. Chairs had been pulled askew as people had found conversation inside their grief circles. Mara let out a sigh of relief. She smiled for the first time in four hours. She was free. She was finally an orphan. She was finally free of a family that had felt like a prison for thirty years. Her father lay inside the coffin. The mortician had somehow covered up the stink of his evil. She must be some sort of magician to cover all that toxic nonsense with nothing more than paint and pigment.
Mara unpinned her hair and took a deep breath of her new life. Soon her father would be nothing more than a bag of bones. She wished him the afterlife he deserved and gathered up her things. Today was the first day of the rest of her life.
The prompts for this short story:
orphan
father
euphoria
slash
Marakesh
slash
bag of bones
Copyright 2019 Klaudia Grady