𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 ━ transformers

𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞

The casket was empty when we held the funeral.

It sat on stands at the front of the room, the polished mahogany wood gleaming from the rays of sunlight shining through the crystalline windows in the funeral home. I sat with my mother, who was to the right of me, brunette hair falling in her face like a curtain to shade her tears. My own heart fluttered, twinged in my chest angrily, but I couldn't allow my tears to fall, even as the preacher spoke empty words about how brave a man he was, how amazing he would have been had he been given the chance.

The words flowed in and out of my ears like a wave in the ocean, and when he was finished talking, I hadn't a clue what fell off his lips. I figured it didn't matter. None of it really mattered, in the end. Soon, the casket would be gone, buried six feet under the ground, sheltered by clumps of dirt, and the words the pastor preached would be a distant memory in these everyone's thoughts.

There was a crowd here. I was stupefied when they kept piling in the room, all in identical depressing obsidian like it was the only thing they had in their closet. They had tears in their eyes, some of them already caked down faces of strangers, ruining any semblance I had that this was something other than a funeral, and they had given me their condolences as they passed me to their seats. I had listened, but my mind was elsewhere. My mother had to thank them for me.

I figured, after I finished scanning the audience, that this was how it was supposed to be. Of course, he would have a plethora of people at his funeral. He was too charismatic, too loving and joyous not to. He lightened people's day, filled their hearts with a blissful warmth just by being himself. The crowd should not have been a surprise by any means.

When the pastor concluded yet another speech, we were supposed to follow the pallbearers, who were carrying the casket, out of the home. We were supposed to go to the burying. I loathed this part.

Mom tapped me on the shoulder. I took my gaze off the empty spot where the casket used to be to stare at her. Her hazel eyes were slit in pain, and they seemed bigger due to the wetness of them. I had to look away. She choked on a sob.

"Let's go, honey," she said, softly--kindly, like I was a child who needed to be soothed. Her best friend and our next-door neighbor, Sarah Lennox, sat beside her, but she moved and trailed behind the moving crowd while we remained stationary.

I didn't speak. My hands remained limp in my lap. I gave her no reaction that I heard her. I didn't know if I could--if I was capable of one. I wanted to scream at her that I didn't want to go to the graveyard. I wanted to cry and shout that I didn't want to sit outside in freezing temperatures while the pastor uttered more meaningless words about him just so people could shed more tears before the lowered the casket in the ground for good.

Mom took my silence as a confirmation. She stood, slowly, like her bones were aching. I kept my eyes on the altar and then, I jolted as she put her hands on my handlebars and started wheeling me towards the exit.

People parted like the Red Sea as we exited. I could feel their stares on my face--pity for a girl whose world was shattered, whose face was marred. I ignored them even though the skin under my salves started to itch annoyingly, let Mom and Sarah hoist me into the Tahoe. The tinted windows were like a blanket of security for me. Now, no one could taunt me, no one could look at me, could stare at the healing gashed littering my face. It was a breath of fresh air.

We drove to the graveyard in somber silence, and I went through the same routine as before, listening to the pastor talk as the bitter chill of January nipped at me. My nose was rubbed raw by the end of it.

As they lowered the casket in, I felt my heart drop. I felt the realness of it all. He was gone; he wasn't coming back. There would be no more days filled with laughter as we ran around the house, making up nonsense and playing pranks on each other. There would be no more days where he would come into my room and interrupt my art for me to go on a run with him. There would be no more days where he would go to the base with our father, eager and passionate about training to be a soldier. There would be no more days where he denied his friends the right to hang out so we could go to the treehouse and read comic books all day.

Now, there would just be an empty space where he was--a dark void that chilled me to the bone, made me want to scream with the venomous bite of it.

Theodore Cambridge was a wisp in the wind, a whisper through the night. He was the person who would be remembered for how he was, not how he was going to be. He was my brother, my best friend. And he was gone.

And, for the first time since I was rolled out of the hospital, I allowed the tears to fall. I wept for my brother; I wept for myself and my mother--for my father, who was out saving the world and could not attend his own son's funeral. I wept for all the people losing a friend, an ally. I wept for the world and I wept for the absence that Theodore created.

The first fistful of dirt dropped on the casket, and the noise was hollow in my ears.

A drop of snow melted on my cheek, mixing in with warm tears.