I made my way toward the woman standing alone by the hearse.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“No. We haven’t met. Your husband and I—” the woman hesitated. “I knew your husband,” she said, her voice hovering over each word as though she did not want to bear down on them with undue gravity, as though she did not want to stake a claim greater than she had claim to. And something shifted beneath the pale surface of her made up face. I saw then how the whites of her eyes were dull and traced with thin lines of blood, and that her lips were dark and swollen.

“My husband’s dead,” I said, gesturing at the long black car beside us. The woman and I stood there, reflected in the dark body of the hearse, and I saw that she was crying, something I had not yet given in to. “My husband’s dead,” I told myself, wondering when it was that I first lost him.

About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘After the Funeral’

‘After the Funeral’ was first published in SWAMP, May no.10, 2012

Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen.